Dear Colleagues,
As a prelude to the conference, "Design in the University"
I am posting the book review on the UCISD report from
the June issue of Design Research News.
In my view, the work that Dick Taylor and his colleagues
have done in their work on this project is of extraordinary
value to our field. Few of us will be able to build a new
design school. In fact, current economic trends in California
mean that even these plans will be delayed before the project
can move forward. Nevertheless, what the School of Design
Committee learned in developing the UCISD proposal has
many uses.
This review explains why, and offers my arguments for
the uses that every design school can make of the UCISD
proposal.
-- Ken Friedman
Friedman, Ken. 2003. "Proposal for a School of Design at the
University of California, Irvine." Book review. Design Research News,
Volume 8, Number 6, June.
--
University of California Irvine School of Design Committee. 2002.
Proposal for a School of Design at the University of California,
Irvine. November 2002. Irvine: University of California, Irvine. URL:
http://www.evc.uci.edu/growth/design/SoD-proposal.pdf Accessed 2003
May 2.
--
When one of the world's great universities plans a major, new design
school, the planning process is as interesting - and important - as
the result. In this case, it is the University of California, and the
project has already taken three years from the initial commission to
the consultation and consensus process needed for the immense
investment required by a new school of design.
What makes this process of wide interest to the field is that fact
that the proposal itself is available on-line to the entire
university community - and to the wider communities of design
research and design education. This month's feature book review
examines an important and far-reaching report for the new University
of California design school.
[ Report available for free download in .pdf format at URL:
http://www.evc.uci.edu/growth/design/SoD-proposal.pdf. ]
In the fall of 2000, the University of California at Irvine
established a committee to develop a proposal "to create a school of
design to foster inquiry into the nature of design and the design
process. Its objective would be to advance the techniques of design,
to train students in the technical and aesthetic dimensions of design
at both the undergraduate and professional levels, and to investigate
the deep intellectual and cultural issues associated with design in a
rapidly changing world" (UC Irvine Ad Hoc Committee on Design 2000:
1).
Chaired by Professor Richard Taylor of information and computer
science, the authors of the report include professors Kristen Day and
Sanjoy Mazumdar of urban and regional planning, Michael D'Zmura of
cognitive sciences, Douglas Goheen of drama, Michael McCarthy of
mechanical and aerospace engineering, Molly Schneider of design
programs, and Alladi Venkatesh of management, as well as Michael
Clark, professor of English and comparative literature and associate
executive vice chancellor for academic planning.
As a high-level study on the needs and requirements of
university-level design education, the proposal is significant in its
own right. It offers a robust analysis of the factors involved in
research-based design education today.
The report brings forward important findings in five dimensions,
philosophical, intellectual, academic, professional, and economic.
The history of universities is long and distinguished. While modern
universities began in the eighth century AD, the first schools and
research centers date back to Athens in the fifth century BC and
Alexandria not long after. Professional schools go back even farther,
and professional education now dates back nearly five thousand years.
Building a professional school within a university involves four
great challenges. These challenges are:
1) Creating new knowledge,
2) Preserving existing knowledge,
3) Training specialists, and
4) Educating citizens
These challenges involve an inherent tension that makes it difficult
to develop a new professional school by starting on the foundation of
an existing school or department. This, in fact, has been one of the
continuing dilemmas in design education. Design education was never
part of the university tradition nor was it part of the first
professional schools. Instead, design education was rooted in the
crafts guilds. This foundation still flavors design education and the
professional practice of design (Byrne and Sands 2002; Friedman 1997).
The UCI design school proposal is philosophically important because
it has been conceived as a purpose-built professional design school
in the university context. Reading the report makes clear just how
carefully the committee has addressed the issues and concerns of such
a school. The proposal balances challenges and solutions in an
intelligent and sophisticated way and the school is based on a robust
series of balanced decisions.
The philosophical importance of this model is simple. We live in a
demanding world sometimes labeled as a knowledge economy. This world
demands new forms of higher education, and new forms of professional
education that must be located within universities.
While there is wide agreement that we must develop new ways of
learning and working, the traditions, customs, and practices of
existing schools and disciplines make it difficult to bring new
approaches into being. As a purpose-built school with a new faculty
hired and brought together to realize a new vision, the UCI design
school can become an important testing ground for education, for
knowledge development, and for research. Solving the challenges that
will face one school will yield important lessons to other schools
and to other universities.
Because of this, the UCI design school promises to make an important
philosophical contribution to education in the twenty-first century.
The intellectual challenges are equally important. This proposal
offers new models for design education that integrate teaching and
research, learning and doing. Most design schools have been built on
the foundation of existing programs. This means that they begin out
of balance with a program lodged in prior traditions that lean too
far in one direction or another and a staff of faculty partisans each
urging that every tradition be maintained. This school will start
with no such handicap. As a result, the UCI School of Design can make
an intellectual contribution of a kind that has never before been
seen in design education.
Because it is purpose-built, the UCI design school will be a model
that challenges other design schools to rise to a new level. It will
do so for many reasons. First, it will compete with other schools for
the best faculty and for the best students. Other schools will have
to improve to remain attractive to their staff and students. Second,
it will become a rich center of resources, supporting its competitors
at the same time that it challenges them. Third, it will be an
important center of teaching and learning for those who come to UCI
to study or to teach.
Together with teaching and learning, research activities will make
such a school the center of a new approach to professional design.
This will establish its contribution to the profession. On a
fundamental level, training designers to meet the needs of a growing
economy is a vital professional contribution. On a higher level,
however, the role this school can play as a resource center and model
will make a powerful contribution to the larger profession, a
contribution that reaches beyond Irvine and beyond California to
affect the larger global design profession.
The final contribution is economic. If California were an independent
nation, it would rank as the world's firth or sixth largest economy,
just ahead of France or slightly behind, depending on the exchange
rate.
In 1940, the Australian economist Colin Clark (1940: 338). identified
three classes of economic sector: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
The primary sector extracts wealth from nature. This includes
agriculture, livestock, farming, hunting and trapping, fishing and
forestry. Secondary industries transform extracted material through
manufacturing, building, construction, mining, and power production.
Tertiary industries are organized around services, including commerce
and distribution, transport, public administration, personal and
professional services.
Daniel Bell (1976, 1999: lxxxv) rebuilt Clark's structure to describe
what became known as the post-industrial society, refining Clark's
concept of service industries into three distinct sectors, a tertiary
sector including transportation and utilities, a quarternary sector
including trading and finance, and a quinary sector including health,
education, research, and recreation.
The most visible aspect of today's global knowledge economy is the
fact that the greatest value is added to products and services
through human activity. For this reason, the competitive strategy of
corporations - and of regions or nations - involves finding ways to
develop industries that add the greatest value to national economies.
In a world where design represents an opportunity to add value to
products and services at a relatively low marginal cost, design is a
central tool for creating competitive advantage. In this sense, a
leading-edge design school can become an instrument for economic
growth.
The birth of the great public universities helped to bring about
America's transition from a growing industrial power at the end of
the nineteenth century to a central world power at the dawn of the
twenty-first century.
To protect and nurture its role as the world's "sixth largest
economy," California must invest in its university sector. Here, the
proposal represents one of several choices. The University of
California can and will grow, as all great universities do, and
advanced industrial democracies depend on universities for their
survival as well as for their growth. The question is which
investment among competing alternatives will best serve the needs of
the university and the citizens it serves.
This report makes a compelling case for the design as a promising
area for investment, linked to a rich and increasingly important
range of California-based industries. While the university must
invest heavily to launch the school, the school will later attract
funding and resources to the university in ways that cannot be
imagined today.
Together with several colleagues (Mollerup et al. 2003), I recently
had the opportunity to study the design sector in one of the
candidate nations applying for membership in the European Union. We
found that the transition from a comparatively primitive economy to a
sophisticated and robust economy involves a steady progression upward
along what we labeled the "design maturity scale." The journey
involves a transition from subcontracted production for foreign firms
to the production for locally owned businesses, from domestic sales
to export sales, from manufacturing parts to manufacturing whole
products, from anonymous products to branded products, from
production oriented business to market oriented business. In some
cases, it also involves a transition that includes growth from
material to immaterial products, from products to services, and from
services to experiences.
One factor that makes the UCI proposal so interesting is that the
four specializations cover the comprehensive range of issues in the
design maturity scale. Interaction design, product design, and
spatial design, together with design studies makes a rich approach
that brings all levels of research and all areas of inquiry together
in one proposal.
The proposal for the School of Design at the University of
California, Irvine, describes a promising venture. I believe that it
will prove to be a profitable investment for the university in
economic and academic terms while contributing to human knowledge and
to the design profession.
University-level design education involves two great
responsibilities. The first is to structure an effective learning
process to educate tomorrow's designers. The second is contributing
to the knowledge the field through basic, applied, and clinical
research.
This requires meeting the challenge of a process shaped by the
complexity of artifacts, services, and systems in societies,
economies, and industries with increasingly ambiguous boundaries.
This environment demands a qualitatively different approach to
professional education than was the case in earlier times. To meet
these challenges, design education has shifted from the vocational
and guild approach of art and design schools to the professional
schools of the modern university.
Art and design generally entered the university when art and craft
schools or technical schools merged into existing universities. These
schools undergo a transformation as they integrate the forms of the
old guild culture with the education and research traditions of the
general university. It is often a difficult transition. The
transition is even more difficult for former art and design schools
that have been designated as universities by political decision.
These schools must rise to meet the demands of university education
and research without the broader network of colleagues and traditions
that helps merging schools to make the shift.
The research culture of the university requires far different habits
of mind and behavior than the culture of studio practice around which
art and design schools are built. The changes from one kind of
culture to another are difficult, and the transition can often take
decades.
A university that could build a design school from the foundation up
would have an unparalleled opportunity to shape a new kind of design
education. The planning process - and the learning process - would
involve valuable lessons. These lessons could be put to good use by
other university-level design schools, including those with strong
traditions of their own.
This report offers design schools a chance to benefit from the
three-year process of research and development that will - one hopes
- lead to a School of design at the University of California, Irvine.
To complete their work, the authors reviewed the state of
professional design education today around the world, along with
design research and design research training in the world's leading
universities.
In today's economic climate, few universities - and fewer design
schools - will have the budgetary resources to build (or rebuild)
design education on the level of a new purpose-built school. What
this report offers to existing schools is an opportunity to learn
from improvements and changes implemented elsewhere, adapting them to
local needs and opportunities. In planning a design school for the
twenty-first century, the authors of this report have written a
research and development study on which other schools can build as
they shape their programs for the future.
-- Reviewed by Ken Friedman
References
Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Coming of Post-industrial Society.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bell, Daniel. 1999. The Coming of Post-industrial Society. A Venture
in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books.
Byrne, Bryan, and Ed Sands. 2002. "Designing Collaborative Corporate
Cultures." In Creating Breakthrough Ideas, Bryan Byrne and Susan E.
Squires, editors. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 47-69.
Clark, Colin. 1940. Conditions of Economic Progress. London: Macmillan and Co.
Friedman, Ken. 1997. "Design Science and Design Education." In The
Challenge of Complexity. Peter McGrory, ed. Helsinki: University of
Art and Design Helsinki, 54-72.
Mollerup, Per, Ken Friedman, Pekka Korvenmaa, and John Landerholm.
2003. Establishing the basis for the elaboration of the Estonian
design policy measures. Final Report. Tallinn: Ministry of Economic
Affairs and Communications.
UC Irvine Ad Hoc Committee on Design. 2000. Report of the Ad Hoc
Committee on Design. Irvine: University of California, Irvine.
UC Irvine School of Design Committee. 2002. Proposal for a School of
Design at the University of California, Irvine. November 2002.
Irvine: University of California, Irvine. URL:
http://www.evc.uci.edu/growth/design/SoD-proposal.pdf Accessed 2003
May 2.
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University
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