For more than a decade, Tim McNeil has been taking students on a design journey through Europe, visiting a seemingly impossible number of museums, attractions and art exhibits over a four-week period. The UC Davis professor of design challenges the students to take in and document everything they encounter using all their senses. Their experiences go home with them in the form of visual journals. 

Since the first iteration of the trip in 2010, “Design in Europe” students have kept visual journals of their travels — six to eight pages per day — that are a mix between a scrapbook, sketchbook, travelogue, collage and diary. At the end of each trip, the journals are displayed to the public in whichever city the students are in.  

The journals have been exhibited in Iceland, Scotland, England and the Netherlands. They’ve never been seen by a U.S. audience. And the different years have never been on display together, all at once. Until now.  

The upcoming exhibition, “Visual Journals: 2010-2024,” will be on display, in parts, at both the UC Davis Design Museum and the International Center Jan. 21 through April 25. The feel of the exhibition aims to capture this array of experiences and interpretations as well as the feeling of community enjoyed by program participants. 

“This exhibition is somewhat of a revelation for me as well. Revisiting many of these journals in a different setting is quite surreal — they are like old friends,” McNeil said. “During the program, I look at them several times quickly and, on the go, and then they leave with each student. The opportunity to bring these amazingly creative objects together in one room and consider what they represent for each student who participated in the program over a long period of time is remarkable.” 

Starting with a blank page 

Each journal starts with a big question: What is design in Europe? 

Journaling becomes a social activity as students spend their evenings completing their work together while, simultaneously, incorporating vastly different styles.  

Some have even incorporated other types of media like photos, videos and recorded sounds. Students manipulate the books as well, sometimes strategically making cut-outs in certain pages. 

“They’re very visually driven,” McNeil said. “These journals become a little bit obsessive.” 

The students very quickly learn that, in order to complete the assignment, they need to work fast and not be too precious about their work. The fast-paced, high-pressure assignment mimics the groups pace of travel.  

“Some students get a bit daunted by this so I'll say ‘We'll do a few pages to find a style and once you've found that style, then we'll work on them,'" McNeil said.  

Design students, he said, are usually feeling the pressure more than non-design students. The exercise quickly helps students who don’t have traditional artistic backgrounds explore their ideas in a new way and pushes students who are already artists past their perfectionistic tendencies and relax into the work. And they all start to build their confidence.  

“They learn to let go a little bit,” McNeil said.  

“At the start of the trip, I was definitely one of those students that was really stressed about how my journal would look and I would take hours on a single page,” said Emma O’Connor, a fourth-year double major in design and communication who went on the trip in 2022. She’s also a Design Museum curatorial assistant working on the exhibition.  

“Throughout all of the experience, I learned to let go and just have fun with it and, while doing that, my design became a lot better. I think while we're in school we get so focused on making it absolutely perfect that we kind of forget to have fun sometimes and that's where some really amazing ideas come from.” — Emma O’Connor

The results are not only a record of their journeys but a unique visual representation of the beautiful, the mundane, the disturbing, exhausting and sometimes icky parts of being human. For example, journals might include exquisite sketches, funny comics, cafe napkins, museum tickets, postcards, receipts, inside jokes and strategically placed cutouts. 

It’s not just the pages that are the art, the whole book becomes a piece of art.  

“The books have become really quite beautiful objects into themselves,” McNeil said. 

A curatorial challenge 

O’Connor and fellow student curatorial assistant Jadzia Pho, a third-year design major who is minoring in public health, have been reaching out to hundreds of past students trying to locate and collect the journals for the exhibition. Pho participated in the program in 2022. Both have been designing the exhibition along with McNeil.  

“There’s a lot of variety in what aesthetic can look like. Even when you're analyzing the same thing in the same type of design, you can still interpret it very differently and represent it very differently depending on how you view it.” — Jadzia Pho 

From finding former students and collecting their journals to figuring out how to display the journals, O’Connor and Pho are getting vast experience not only in design but also the logistics behind museum curation.  

Because many of the UC Davis emails of alums are no longer active, the curators had to get creative in trying to connect with older alums, often using social media to make the initial connection.  

“I basically had my computer split screen with one having the list of all the names and one having the LinkedIn page,” O’Connor said. “I would type in every single name and see if I could find someone who is connected to people at Davis or who went to Davis and then I would message them and just hope that they would respond.” 

“And, you know what, a lot of people did and I got a lot of really sweet messages, one person telling me that they still journal to this day,” she added.    

Even getting the massive books, many of which are busting at the seams and weigh as much as five to 15 pounds each, back to Davis was a challenge. While many alums of the program still reside in California, others have relocated to further away places like New York, Boston and London.  

The curatorial team has even traveled to San Francisco and Los Angeles to physically pick up journals.

After securing the books, other questions arose.  

“How do you give people access but also protect the book?” McNeil said. 

Should people be able to flip through the pages or is just one page displayed? Should books be protected in a display cabinet or out of its box, free to be touched, sniffed or accidentally sneezed on? Is the original artist OK with any of the pages being displayed or are some too private? Some of the books, especially the older ones, have spines already weak under the pressure of packed pages.  

The answer for each book included in the exhibition is different depending on the comfort level of the original artist. Some will be encased while others will be displayed outside of cases. Some will be represented in other ways, including in photos McNeil has taken of all his students holding their journals turned to their favorite page. 

“They are museum objects and they’re very fragile,” Pho said. “They will fall apart if they’re not picked up properly, or some of the things are very likely to fall out.” 

The exhibition will include tables and supplies to show what the student journaling parties often look like in real life. There will an interactive area as well where visitors can contribute to a collective journal.  

“We’re really aiming to get the feeling of this trip and all journaling together,” O’Connor said. They’re also trying to capture the sense of community they gained from the experience.   

“Visual Journals: 2010-2024,” will be on display at the UC Davis Design Museum and the International Center Jan. 21 through April 25. An opening reception will be 4 to 6 p.m. on Jan 22 at the International Center, 463 California Ave., in Davis. 

Interested in joining the program? Applications for Design in Europe are open now. This year’s group will travel to England, Scotland and Iceland between July 5 and Aug. 2. 

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