Dear Harold,

I, too, undertook to design an experimental graduate
program based on the design process.
My program was structured around seven
specializations: design management, design
information, design methods, design communication,
design simulation, design assessment and design
systems. My objective was to fashion a design/research
team each member of which had responsibility for
developing expertise in a field of knowledge within
design. Each of the eight (carefully selected)
students received full fellowships with the
understanding that half their time would be focused on
a research project to develop a comprehensive system
to support design, the other half on a program of
study that they developed (with my help) to pursue
learning in their specialty. In effect, they were
agents for their specialty in a collaborative effort
to develop a system capable of supporting a
multidisciplinary design team during the design of
advanced driver interfaces, a system that incorporated
a driving simulator and human factors assessment of
the driver using the interface in the augmented
virtual environment of the simulator. We did build and
demonstrate the seven module system,  graduating
sixteen? students over the six years that the program
existed.

We did a lot of things differently. Some of them were
hard for the University administrators to rationalize.
For example, we admitted every two years so that a
smaller staff could follow each cohort through to the
end. Although accredited as an experimental Masters
program in ID we admitted students from cognitive
science, mechanical engineering, sculpture, and
graphic design also. They came from Brazil, Germany,
China, and Korea as well as the US. Each student
received an extra stipend of $3000/year that they
could spend to attend conferences, buy software, visit
centers of excellence in their field or even hire
tutors. (We obviously did not have the faculty on hand
to address all the areas of expertise involved. We did
have a computer science guy, a systems architect, me,
a part time faculty member, a cybrarian, and every now
and then a programmer.) We brought in a lot of
consultants and guest lecturers to advise the students
and assist the research. Nearly all of the students
took Karl Ulrich's excellent MBA course on product
development at the Wharton School, University of
Pennsylvania, and he, with some other great people,
was an advisor to the program. Many of the thesis read
like PhD dissertations .

The situation was unique due to the research project,
off-budget funding, and the fact that we were at an
arts university. But when the research was completed
and I departed, the program reverted to something more
normal. (It is still good just with a different focus,
leadership, modus operandi - and budget.)

As this effort suggests, I believe that we have to
integrate learning and doing design at a higher level
in which design is approached as a technically
mediated collaborative process.  A "roles and modes"
approach worked for us and helped us learn a great
deal.

Best regards,

Chuck

Dr. Charles Burnette
234 South Third Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Tel: +215 629 1387
e-mail: [log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhDs
in Design
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Harold
Nelson
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2003 2:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Design learning


Dear Chris et al

I am presently working on a manuscript describing my
experience with
the design of a graduate design program. It was an
extended 'action
research' project rather than the more typical
incremental curriculum
redesign processes that is typical at many if not most
universities in
North America. Russ Ackoff, a well known American
systems consultant,
makes the case that optimizing only an element of a
system
sub-optimizes the system as a whole. So designing a
whole curriculum
rather than an individual course seemed like a good
way to test
Ackoff's belief in the academic realm. The process of
introducing
incremental changes into existing curriculum with
extended periods of
time spent getting approvals and then evaluating the
effects of the
changes incrementally had been my experience prior to
this opportunity.
For me this was an opportunity to design a curriculum
based on the
design tradition rather than borrowed from one of the
other
intellectual traditions. I don't know that this
approach would be
appropriate for other design fields but for
organizational systems
design it was very successful based on a wide variety
of measurements
and evaluations.

In the case of the design of this new design program
(actually two
delivery methods but one pedagogy) I first explored
the implicit
educational designs in place at the universities I had
attended as a
student or worked at as a faculty. I looked at other
university designs
as well but did not make a comprehensive study of all
programs. For
instance, as an undergraduate in architecture, it was
assumed that
physics 101, 102 and 103 would 'add up' for me in the
end. The 'adding
up' process. took many forms; aggregation of facts and
information,
hierarchy of knowledge etc. I realized that there were
several implicit
process in place based on how people assumed
scientific knowledge was
created and accumulated and thus transmitted to
students, or how the
humanities or the arts assumed knowledge was
transmitted and
accumulated etc. so my design question was how does
design knowledge
get created and accumulated? The core idea I chose to
work with was
that any design process was essentially a learning
process. I used a
generalized design process as the overall learning
process model for
the programs. Students engaged in three design
projects, two from the
very beginning. The first project was the co-design of
their
educational experience, the second was the design of
the designer i.e.
personal and professional development and finally a
design project that
started later in the process that involved real
clients and included
experts from outside academia as coaches, mentors and
evaluators in
addition to program faculty. The degree process
consisted of very
different phases, each depending on the prior phase
and feeding into
the next phase. Each phase had it own dominant
learning approaches such
as analysis in one phase and synthesis in another.
Learning was
demonstrated at key milestones throughout the process.
Documentation
for the degree included documentation from all phases
of the degree
process and not just the terminal phase. It was
complex and demanding
for both students and faculty and was not nearly as
economic as
lectures and large studios (which was the biggest
challenge to its
survival).

There were many challenging questions that arose from
both outside and
inside the program during my tenure because it was so
different from
other university's programs including other design
programs. For
instance a recurring question was about breadth vrs.
depth of
knowledge. How could a program that was not focused on
a particular
content area and that cut across disciplines and
fields of interest
have rigor?  This was a special concern for the
accrediting teams
(regional and university based) that reviewed the
programs several
times. The design answer was that the expertise was
not in breadth or
depth but in a third way—composition i.e. how things
were connected;
integrated in such a way as to evoke desired emergent
qualities. For
any such questions that emerged we always tried to
answer them from a
design perspective so that if changes or modifications
were made it
would be based on a congruency with the underlying
pedagogy of design
learning. I have come away from this experience
convinced that design
learning requires its own intellectual tradition upon
which to build. I
am not optimistic that this can occur easily in
existing North American
universities but there are some exciting exceptions
like the new
proposed design program at UC Irvine in S. California.

Regards

Harold


On Sunday, August 24, 2003, at 04:03 AM, Chris Heape
wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> Firstly Chris Kemmett and Chuck, thanks for your
responses, re:
> learning experience.
>
> Chuck, you very much confirm my own experiences with
the students.
> Namely that the students can be shown that they
understand a lot more
> than they realise - even if they've just started.
> My own view is that once they can orientate their
own human
> experiences to the experience of the task, then
their range of
> associations and links to their imagination can give
them an
> understanding that means something to them at a far
deeper level,
> than, say, if they'd just been served up with some
information. Hence,
> I suspect, the reason for the quality of discussion
afterwards.
>
> Now if I may, I'd like to try and broaden this
discussion.
>
> I would really appreciate some input and challenges
from the list
> regarding the notion of "Design Learning".
>
> In a mail to the list (18th August - re: Judgement
and decision
> making) I briefly explained my understanding of
design learning as:
>
> ..."Just to make my interest clear, I would like to
introduce the
> notion of "Design Learning". I sense that design
learning is an
> attitude of mind that relates both to the context of
design students
> learning AND to the exploratory and experimental
phases of
> professional design practice.  I consider design
learning as a concept
> that covers a broad range of activities, processes
and methods used to
> gain an understanding to make the necessary choices,
decisions and
> judgements with regard to a given design task..."
>
> I see now that where I've written exploratory and
experimental phases,
> I should also have included enquiry.
>
> So what I'd like to put up for debate is:
>
> How is the term "design learning" understood?
> What is it?
> Is it, as I have suggested, linked to both design
education and design
> practice? Or is this an anomaly?
> Or is it only something dealt with in an educational
environment?
> Can one approach an understanding of design as a
combination of design
> solution-producing activities and design learning
activities?
> Or can one describe design as essentially design
learning, in that
> there is an ongoing series of enquiry and
experiment, the synthesis of
> which is expressed as negotiated proposals that must
ultimately
> reflect the learning involved?
>
> I feel that there is the potential for a rich
discussion here and I
> would very much appreciate any kind of input, be it
theoretical or
> examples of specific cases or contexts.
>
> I need to broaden my understanding of the concept of
design learning.
>
> I look forward o your responses.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Chris.
>
>
> -------------
>
> from:
>
> Chris Heape
> Senior Researcher - Design Didactics / Design
Practice
> Mads Clausen Institute
> University of Southern Denmark
> Sønderborg
> Denmark
>
> http://www.mci.sdu.dk
>
> Work @ MCI:
> tel: +45 6550 1671
> e.mail: chris @mci.sdu.dk
>
> Work @ Home:
> tel +45 7630 0380
> e.mail: [log in to unmask]
>
Harold G. Nelson, Ph.D., M. Arch.
President; Advanced Design Institute
www.advanceddesign.org
Past-President; International Society for Systems
Science
www.isss.org
Affiliated faculty, Engineering, U. Wash.