Hello,

I congratulate the proposal designers of the UCI plan on bringing together the elements of this proposal. None of the elements are new and many of the key ones have been proposed and validated decades ago. The work undertaken in developing the UCI proposal is impressive as are the analyses and the written proposal itself.
What I feel is new and remarkable and praiseworthy of the UCI planners is to look at these 'advanced' issues and draw on them to develop a coherent proposal for a design school - a task most education institutions involved in training designers have conservatively avoided thus far for a variety of reasons. 

I'm concerned about a couple of issues that focus on designing a School of Design on the basis of 'purpose of tertiary education' rather than 'best of what exists'. These centrally relate to learning:

·     Learning loops with other design disciplines, particularly design disciplines more advanced in key areas of design theory and skill. In this I'm thinking of mechanical engineering design. Typically mechanical engineering design theories and design practices seem to be around 40 years ahead of 'Art and Design' domains - even more so in the areas of advances in drawing and sketching. 
·     Importance for student learning of the role of high level thinking - and radical implications for course content

These issues are important for the development of a School of Design in relation to improved research,  theories and practices in the following key areas::

·     Collaborative teamwork
·     Multidisciplinary issues
·     New advances/developments in sketching and drawing
·     Strategic issues with regard to avoiding failure
·     Dealing with high levels of complexity
·     Managing and designing in projects that have large scale, scope, financial commitments (and also potentially the risk of expensive failure_
·     Shortened timeframes
·     Environmental concerns and sustainability
·     Parallel tracking different design and production processes
·     Managing design activity alongside other business activities
·     Addressing rework issues
·     Use of advanced techniques and methods
·     Use of computer programs and processes that help designers integrate their work into larger scale business processes


Others in this conference have pointed out that  in many areas of design these are now well developed. I'm concerned about the limited focus of the Irvine proposal in this context - in particular in relation to the bounds on the relationship to the mechanical engineering design domain.

My concerns on this are: 

1. Deepcut analyses of products  show that 
product design and the traditional 'Art and Design' design modalities are the tiny tip of a huge 'iceberg' of design  and typically account for around 1% of the total design work underpinning a product. This may be a conservative estimate because it doesn't include many of the newer design fields such as those relating to business process and organisational design. In the reviews I have undertaken, it appears that the bulk of the design work that products depend on comes from the fields of mechanical engineering and electro-mechanical engineering. 

As Rob and GK have pointed out, that there are lots of design practices at present considered advanced or new material in design schools that are 'done deals' in industry. Many of these were done deals decades ago in some areas of design. Collaborative design processes, team working, multidisciplinary design teams were well established in the 70s in mechanical engineering projects. Advances on sketching and drawing that capture other product properties that its appearance - for example its behaviour were well developed over a hundred years ago in engineering design. These graphical techniques re still are powerfully used to give great insights into product behaviour. (Much of the mathematical techniques are nothing more than advances on sketching to provide more detail about product behaviour, as it is likely to be experienced by users. 

In product development terms relating to sustainability and integration with business processes, stockholding, supply chain management, these are already standard practices - see, for example, PLM software by larger corporations such as SAP and IBM, that is now already enveloping previous large scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions. 

University design education in mechanical engineering and related fields is closely coupled with these advances in design practices. In educational terms, the design-focused research programs are well represented by high status professional doctorates such as the UK EngD whose engineering design recipients usually command a higher starting salary than engineers with a PhD.

In addressing rework issues, the mechanical engineering design area is approximately 20 years ahead of civil engineering and the construction industry. This contrasts with the 'Art and Design' fields where there is not yet any significant literature and research into the costs, causes and means of avoidance of rework  - or how design education can contribute to its reduction. Rework is one of the major inefficiencies and cost problems in design industries and the industries they serve - yet rework mitigation is not in serious consideration in any of the 'Art and Design' design fields.  

The use of Systems again provides a powerful design tool. This is of particular significance for 'Art and Design' design fields because one of the most powerful aspects of Systems analyses, particularly in relation to product design, is to identify counter intuitive situations. Human intuition is a powerful tool that enables us to contribute to those aspects of a design solution for which there are not explicit guidelines or solution or when straightforward experience does not provide an answer. Intuition is what we have left when more reliable knowledge isn't available. Intuition as a skill, however, is marked by high levels of illusion, delusion, error and misinformation due to subconscious decision making processes that form the heuristics underpinning individuals' intuitions. Intuition is a fine thing when nothing better is available but the outcomes need careful checking for intuitive errors. These problems render those using intuition blind to the very large number of situations whose understanding is counter intuitive. Systems analyses provide a useful tool to protect designers from the problems associated with their use of their intuitive processes. The utilisation of these systems tools helps avoid significant problems that have long been identifies as problematic with the use of intuition in complex design situations and for which there is a substantial design literature. The use of these systems tools for designers depends on reasonable understanding of user-focused mathematics of the sort that is commonplace within mechanical engineering design fields.

It is hard for me to envisage any strategic direction the UCI course could have that doesn't imply that course faculty, course organisers and course students should be involved in large and small scale learning loops to advance their knowledge, theory and practices and to advance the School's contribution to improving the national economic and social development through improving designed outputs and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of designers and the broader national design infrastructure.

To me, it seems obvious that the field of mechanical engineering design and associated fields often offers significant learning loop opportunities and decade-scale advances on many of they key issues of design practice, design theory and design education in the program areas proposed for the School of Design at UCI.

For this reason I'm somewhat puzzled at the apparent lack of attention to making a strong connections and learning loops with engineering design programs particularly in the field of mechanical engineering.

The second point on learning concerns the central role of universities' learning programs in helping individuals to function better through improved mentation. In essence, the two core tasks of universities are to develop and disseminate higher-level abstract thought models that provide useful tools. It is the cognitive economy facilitated by the use of these models that is the basis for improving human action and is a central reason for the existence of sponsors willing to fund universities. As time goes on, naturally, the boundary of knowledge moves on as better and more abstract thinking models and concepts are devised and validated.

From this perspective, the role of a design school is to disseminate to its students whatever high level concepts are appropriate to students' future roles in the world. In this, design educators have a special and unusual duty because of the way design activity involves changing the future of the world. In essence, design educators are training 'future changers' - a responsible task with ethical implications. Some of these ethical implications are in the area of making sure students' education is not lacking in ways that impact badly on human futures. Much of this is to do with designers having the ability to competently understand and draw on knowledge from a wide variety of fields of inquiry - in most cases of cutting edge human knowledge this is highly technical, even when in qualitative or philosophical realms. A more expanded discussion is available at (URL****ref)

Together these point to an overarching picture of design education that consists of three components: high level conceptualisation and training about the human activity of designing as a means of generating compositional solutions regardless of domain (this aligns with and goes beyond the consistent requests from industry for designers to be trained in general problem solving skills); a broad and high level education in science, mathematics, humanities and arts to enable designers to competently draw on information and abstract concepts from any of these areas; professional working skills including multidisciplinary team working, management, and the use of supportive technologies. 

The first reaction to this is that it is too much to be possible. The reality is that human thinking is very limited in its models. Much human knowledge is identically structured across disciplines with identical concepts differing only in terminology. A trivial example: the higher level model of 'balance' occurs in a very large number of contexts - weighing scales, justice, equity, value, equations (equals sign), visual characteristics, sound equivalence, colour weighting, voting etc. 

Higher-level mental constructs enable economy of conceptual scale in education processes. This economy has been practically tested in some engineering design courses that simultaneously educate in mechanical, civil and electrical engineering by taking advantage of the use of a small number of conceptual models to replace a   large number of structurally similar domain -defined concepts. (This is without compromising the commitment in the areas of design studies, contextual issues, communication, organisational behaviour and business practices.) Other successful engineering design courses are using conceptual efficiency to enable them to include significant courses in artistic drawing skills and writing. In part, however, this is a drift in scope of engineering design courses forced on them by reducing numbers of students with high level mathematical skills and facilitated by improved engineering design software that requires less mathematical expertise from engineering designers.

These factors suggest a convergence between design education programs originally founded in the 'Art and Design' disciplines and those founded in engineering design disciplines. The strengths of each are typically the weaknesses of the other. 

The implication is that the proposal for the UCI School of Design is a snapshot of the moment of a moving target of best practice in design education.

I'm suggesting that the two proposals above - of allying more strongly with mechanical engineering design and looking to the use of higher level mental constructs to provide educational economy  - are 'aiming at  where the puck will be'. 

Best regards,

Terry

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Dr. Terence Love
Dept of Design
Faculty of BEAD
Curtin University
+61 (0)8 9266 4018
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