Session II - Response by Keith Russell to Lorraine Justice

As Lorraine points out, there is now a considerable amount of history in this community. The current on-line conference is, in a sense, an all-thing, or gathering of the tribes. I am reminded of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowles - each bird turns up and takes its roosting place - or at least, argues about the place it has been alloted.  Some of this is progress and some of it is evidence of the slow rhetoric of community forming - we have been rather good, over the years, at tolerating the chaos.

Yes, it is difficult to put forward a internal proposal in a public way - and yes, all such proposals become open documents. In the opening up of the document we need to attend, I suggest, to the overall strategy. The outline that Lorraine provides is, for me, an excellent reader's guide to this proposal and to proposals in general that I have seen, over the decade, in Design. I will follow Lorraine's guide a little way down the forest path in an effort to keep my responses on track and also because I find them instructive.

Lorraine points out the vital political component, at the start: "* The proposed new school of design at UCI is supported by someone at the chancellor level"

The issue here, I suggest, is timing. Harold Nelson's comments on Session I, indicate that such efforts have been made before, and with all the due attention and rigour expected from a grounding proposal. Harold's quite comment following from this is what needs to be taken on board. Maybe the current proposal has found its political moment in time - but perhaps its historical moment has already passed by. Those who struggled to implement sensible proposals, minus political support, have had to adjust their horizons of expectation and deal a new hand according to the matters at hand (lots of mixed up metaphors in there keith?).

So, in the current proposal we may see the collation of lots of excellent ideas that we have all advocated, at some point in the development of our own degrees. Lacking support at the political level may have aggravated our intentions - that is, we may have grown familiar with our ideas and cultivated a kind of blindness to the world passing by. Or, as my Grandmother would have said: don't ask for what you don't need - you just might get stuck with it. The follow on from this is the pragmatic acceptance that it doesn't really matter what we ask for, we will fix things when the program gets underway.   Happy as this sounds, it is contradictory to the purposes of the PhD list - we do need to keep struggling with what matters and working out what matters.

Lorraine's second point: "* The diversity of the disciplines represented on the committee was apparent and designers were included in the process" - this seems like a good way to evidence the validity of the proposal - and yet, as the PhD group starts to haggle over the details, it becomes apparent that there never is any way to do more than form a team that has a common goal and purpose. It is obvious that the PhD list would never come up with a proposal for a new design degree no matter how many years we stayed on-line. The team-think problem collapses into the previous problem - we can all agree, for example, that we need "diversity". Which gets me to a deeper problem - one that persists in Design - and that is the problem of the "example".

When I wish to gain the support of the larger academic world for my enterprise, they will call on me for an instructive example. Why should the world pay any attention to Design? The diversity of answers that the PhD group could come up with does not help when putting together a proposal - what is needed in a singular telling thing - medicine needs little justification, for most people, and yet why it is in universities is as mystery. The example that comes up, in the executive part of the proposal, is the one about voting cards in the USA and the failure to elect the elected President due to poor design. This seems like a telling example, but I suggest that it is in fact an indication of a failure to find the telling thing. Design, as an academic domain, lacks the justification of a disipline. In ist efforts to secure political recognition, it keeps putting up weak examples that do their job, at the political level but fail at the intellectual level. The Tufte one, of why the Shuttle should not have taken off, has the same failure at its core. Design may well have its lever (economics - hence the China example of 400 schools) and it may well have its load (making everything different) but it lacks, at the level of an academic discipline, a fulcrum. Getting lots of diverse people together does not constitute a fulcrum (more like a rugby scrum).

 I don't propose to comment in this response on the  remaining matters that Lorraine raises. My responses to those items is less instructive to the conference - I may comment on them as part of follow ups. 

There is one issue that has been raised (indirectly) that I think does fit inside this session and that is the issue of the matrix of studies. Why do not ALL parts of the program lead to MA and PhD? The closing of the model seems to indicate a mixed agenda - we want integrated  design but we don't want all parts making equal claim on the direction of the program. If I were employed to teach Design Issues in the degree - why can I not have PhD candidates? Is this a failure of nerve, a pragmatic limitation, a restriction on types of faculty members or simply an oversight?

I started with an allusion to Chaucer and the parliament of fowles - I trust that I have not been a parrot of myself, or an aussie galah.

Keith Russell
OZ Newcastle