Dear Ken and everyone,

It may be that  much of this problem should be laid firmly at the feet of
design educators (past and present) and the assessment approaches they use.

Educational assessment in design is typically heavily weighted towards
assessing the appearance and desirability of of a visual representation of a
prototype.

Students quickly learn the professional habit/attitude that effort put into
undertaking background research, reasoning and analysis is wasted compared
to making the visual represention look good.

Example 1: Asessment in an otherwise excellent  web design course required
students to demonstrate their skills at creating an advanced data-base
driven website. Students quickly learned that the effective path to high
marks was to do a makeover of an an existing website (e.g. bank or mining
company). This allowed them to reduce to a minimum the research, reasoning,
thinking and programming (on which they were _apparently_ being assessed)
and instead redirect their time onto issues of appearance. The latter
produced much higher marks.

Example 2: Assessment in a taught Master's course involving a design-focused
research investigation. Asssessment is explicitly _intended_ to assess
student learning in skills of reasoning, and research underpinning to
creating a better design. Actual assessment however, strongly biases towards
visual appearance of a completed design, regardless of whether a student
undertakes _any_ significant investigative work or demonstrates Masters
level  research skills or reasoning. This is particualrly a problem
resulting in low marks for a student in two situations: where a student
undertakes a complex design problem and focuses on the investigative work
that will underpin creating an accurate  design brief (rather than creating
a design itself); and for students whose investigations focus on designing a
process (or other abstract outcome) rather than an outcome that has a
concrete and aesthetically assessable visual appearance. 
Drilling down into the problem reveals five  underlying issues: 
1) design assessors often do not have strong skills in analysis, reasoning
and research - the skills they are supposed to be assessing the students;
2) lack of specific assessment criteria that focus on the sklills being
measured. This leads to a primary focus on assessing the design object
rather that the student's learning of investigative skills;
3) a lack of connection between the negotiated learning process and the
assessment process (i.e the assessors do not know the intended negotiated
learning of the student);
4) use of assessment procedures that are typical to assessing design (short
visual presentation and critique) rather than assessment that delves into
the (sometimes long) investigative reports that students produce
5) a tendency by all involved to re-interpret a Masters investigation as an
undergraduate design project

I feel that the underlying problem is that students (as future design
professionals) are currently being actively trained and accultured to ignore
research and focus on visual outcomes.

If this is correct, the solution most likely involves  significant
retraining of  design educators, or a spill of existing staff and
replacement with design educators with a different approach to design
practice and research.

Best wishes,
Terry