Design Learning and change in the Individual - Prof M P Ranjan - 2 September
2003

Dear Chuck

Your question quoted below is generally true when design practice in
successful agencies is like a roller-coaster ride from one scene of action
to another or from one project to the next with very little real learning
taking place on how they do design although the results of each task is both
credible and effective. Many of us do get caught up in such a chain of
events with little or no time for reflection that could provide such
opportunities for learning about design and in devising new and improved
procedures. This reminds me of Prof. Bruce Archer's advise to all of us at
NID when he had visited our Institute in the early eightees to deliver the
Sir Misha Black Award to the then Director of NID, Mr Ashoke Chatterjee, for
the excellence of the NID's education programmes in design. His specific
comment which I have repeated many times to my students and colleagues was
that "experience by itself does not generate knowledge, but it is the
reflection on and about experience that creates new and useful knowledge
about design". He further suggested that NID should perhaps create a faculty
or staff post that could institute a procedure called in his words,
"contemporaneous documentation", that would provide the resources for such
detailed and informed reflection that in turn would set the platform for the
creation of new knowledge about and from the particular design experience in
question. Great words of wisdom but indeed extremely difficult to implement
and follow in the topsy turvy world of commercial design practice. Today,
with digital tools it is perhaps easier to implement such an exercise, if we
were to embark on it at an Institutional scale. I have tried to follow his
advise over the past couple of years in trying to systematically and
comprehensively document all the stages of work done by my students and also
on my professional and research projects, using digital tools, and the
effect is startling and very satisfying. I now have a (crazy) collection of
over 200,000 digital pictures, fortunately organised and still accessible
for reflection and an additional collection of over 700,000 other digital
files, many duplicates and versions of earlier files.....also organised and
still accesible. This is perhaps possible since I live and work in an
academic environment and at an academic pace and not in a typically
commercial work place.

Now this brings me to the key issue for innovation in the design workflow of
a learning organisation. Can we help create tools for designers that would
facilitate their capture and reuse of the complex action sequences and the
associated data of their various actions so that such reflection can be made
an integral part of their review proceses leading to embedded learning from
all ongoing tasks? A tall order but worth trying since it is extremely
difficult to pry the experiential data out of the designer after the tasks
are completed since many just seem to loose interest in the task stages once
the event is past and a satisfying synthesis is achieved.

There is another situation where some significant learning and change in the
individual has been percieved and this is when we have our student designers
coming into contact with complex challanges in the field that change their
attitude quite completely and in many cases their pre-meditated career paths
as well. The situations that I refer to are tough developmental situations
that could be emotionally taxing as well and that causes or seems to cause a
major shift in the motivation level of the student designer almost as a
response to a higher calling and a search for meaning in their lives and
work. This is one of the reasons that we at NID introduced and encouraged
field contact projects and field exposure programmes in many disciplines as
well as in the Foundation programme as well which is called Environmental
Exposure and the entire class spends a period of two weeks in an Indian
Village away from the campus in the Urban setting. I am convinced that
ideology and motivation play a significant role in design learning but the
exact processes involved still beats me.

I do not know if this response can throw some new light on the very
difficult question/s that you have posed. However I do believe that design
is a very complex and multi-layered activity that is yet to be fully
understood or defined, it is still being discovered by all of us. We will
therefore have many interesting questions to grapple with design learning
which has parallels with other forms of learning but it also has its unique
place. While it uses all of human knowledge in a context driven manner, the
style of operation adopted by the designer is quite diferent from the route
usually taken by the practicioners of that specific discipline. There is
indeed a designerly way of apropriating the available knowledge but this is
still very difficult to describe. Prof. Gui Bonsiepe has offered a new term
for the classification of knowledge with the term "Visuality" used in
conjunction with "Literacy and Numeracy" as the accepted routes for
knowledge creation and documentation. It seems designers tend to use this
route more often but I do not understand this fully as yet and would seek
some clarification on this from you. Perhaps this is what Prof. John Chris
Jones is also exploring in his call for a more universal use of design in
his new book "Internet and Everyone' but that analysis and reflection must
be kept for another day.


With warm regards

Ranjan
from my office at NID
2 September 2003 at 11.50 pm IST

Prof. M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design and
Head, NID Centre for Bamboo Initiatives
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380007
INDIA

Fax: 91+79+6605242
Home: 91+79+6610054
Work: 91+79+6639695 ext 1090

  Dear M. P. Ranjan?

  Thank you for understanding so well what I was trying
  to say. Your elaboration of the various modes of
  thinking/learning were so well written that I also
  want to thank you for the contribution you made to the
  discussion.

  There is only one area where I wish you had gone
  further. Learning to execute "constructive actions
  which brings about a great change in the individual
  themselves" is very important but constructive action
  also involves learning to master causality, time and
  technology. Although designers learn "to do" design
  and gain knowledge and understanding by doing so, they
  often fail to learn "how they do design" and so, in my
  view, fail to build the "tools" for improving the
  discipline.

  Many thanks for your post,

  Best regards
  Chuck