Eduardo's observation rings painfully true.

In Britain the secondary school curriculum includes the opportunity to
study "Product Design" as a "Design and Technology" subject. Kids like
this option because it is practical, they get to make stuff. The other
main design option is graphic design.

So it's not surprising that huge numbers of them apply to study product
design at university, it's what they know about. The old idea that they
might study a whole variety of eclectic design subjects based on what
they are good at has gone out of the window as parents push them to
study apparently safe options.

So we have a glut of people studying Product and Graphic design, two
dinosaur subjects, but few students recognising that there are new
fusions going on. My son wants to be a computer games designer and I
encourage him to seek opportunities to learn about sculpture, or
animation or narrative or interaction or all four, but his teacher says
"that's what graphic designers do" so he thinks he should do a degree in
graphic design.

Here's the shameless bit
However I can assure Eduardo that PhD studies in my university are not
limited by discipline, in fact most projects are deliberate fusions that
seem to be looking to the future, for example Peter Walters' recent
completion of a study which compares the value and use of physical and
virtual models in a wide range of design settings and Michael Hohl's PhD
on telematic experiences. Industrial design may be a fading art (a bit
like farming went from being the main thing to just another thing 200
years ago) but product design in its broadest sense is still a dynamic
discipline - it just ain't about designing 100 mile per hour kitchen
appliances any more.

And if there is a future for industrial design in the post-industrial
world (as there still is worthwhile employment and research in
agriculture) it will lie in design driven by knowledge and inquiry, I've
met people doing both Graphic Design and Product Design who use their
research expertise to drive their practice and they seem to have solved
the problem of where their disciplines are going.

best
Chris
BA (Hons) Industrial Design (Transport) 1985

********************
Professor Chris Rust
Head of Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
+44 114 225 2686
[log in to unmask]
www.chrisrust.net



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