Hi, Eduardo,

Your interpretation of Dori's note --
"convey/communicate design research" -- seems
fair to me. No argument here. In this sense,
lectures clearly serve as a significant vehicle
for conveying and communicating design research
in research-based curricula.

The question would be the degree to which the
lecture conveys or communicates design research
as contrasted with lectures that transmit and
train students in professional practice.

As I see it, the lines of descent are multiple
and complex. You note, for example, that the
Florentine Academy was a university, a guild, and
an association. This is also complicated because
some of the academies and learned societies
developed in distinction as separate from the old
universities. The Royal Society is an example of
this. The societies spoke warmly of the guild and
artisan traditions while arguing against the
traditions of received knowledge that
characterized some of the old universities. The
tradition of inquiry typified by the Royal
Society became the source of many traditions in
the modern university after the Humboldt reforms.

There may be a further sets of differences
between Mediterranean Europe, and North Sea or
Baltic Europe. The fact that most design programs
entered the university in the twentieth century
also makes a difference. The majority of the
world's universities were established in the
twentieth century, and the greatest number of
these after 1950. The first university design
teachers had neither a university-level design
education nor a kind of training resembling those
of the academies. They attended vocational
schools and many had no schooling at all. Others
had some kind of education, but not in design.
This was especially the case in North America,
the largest center of university-level design
education in the era following the 1950s. Those
people who got their professional training in
design studios, whatever their education,
developed a form of pedagogy that effectively
replicates the guild system. (See Byrne and Sands
2002).

Design education often replicates guild training.
My view is not based on a repeated story. It is
based on guild culture described in historical
sources and first-hand observation of similar
traditions at work in design schools. I present
the idea in a book chapter on design science and
design education (Friedman 1997). There may be a
plausible argument that provides a reason for the
development of guild pedagogy in design schools
without recourse to embedded behaviors preserved
through generations of tradition. Either way, the
behaviors are there. To my way of thinking, this
is a behavioral artifact that resembles the way a
freeway traffic slowdown embodies the behavioral
memory of an accident that was cleaned up three
hours earlier, or a path across a park documents
a place where cattle forded a stream that dried
up three centuries earlier. People may not know
the source of culturally embedded behaviors. The
behaviors may nevertheless exist, and they may be
anchored in a variety of histories and traditions.

You're right to suggest several lines of descent.
If this is so -- university, guild, and
association -- then guilds may have more of an
ancestral role than you think.

Two differences may explain our different views.
You came out of the tradition of architecture in
an Atlantic nation linked to the cultural
traditions of the Mediterranean. I studied in
North America. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were
something like 4,500 accredited colleges and
universities in North America, from two-year
colleges up to top level research universities.
At that time, most of these had art departments
that offered design courses or art and design
departments or -- occasionally -- distinct design
programs. I did some massive studies on these,
including direct visits to over two hundred
schools. Things have no doubt changed since then,
but the deep traditions I observed, some going
back many years, do not vanish in a few decades,
so I would argue that what I observed first-hand
cannot be entirely dated or mistaken today.

This has not been all bad. The guilds preserved
and transmitted important knowledge -- they
simply kept it secret, as physicians and lawyers
did until quite recently. They served as sources
and centers of innovation, albeit slow, at a time
when change was slow. Preserving hard-won
knowledge was as significant as creating it.
Every tradition has advantages and drawbacks --
including the academies and the universities. I
don't see acknowledging a history rooted in guild
traditions as an insult to designers. In an
historical sense, evolution is what it is,
describing our origins. I do not feel insulted
over the fact that my distant ancestors were
apes, or the fact that their distant ancestors
were humbler creatures still.

Thanks for the reading list. I'll get a copy of
Karen-Edis Barzman's book to learn more.

And now I think I'll shuffle off to grab a banana
to munch with my afternoon tea. Around my house,
I am often accused of distinctly simian
qualities. I suspect that my accusers may be
right. This is not all bad. I might not have
graduated in theology, but I can still call
myself a higher primate.

Seriously, though, I appreciate your post. I'm simply arguing for pluralism.

Yours,

Ken


--

References

Byrne, Bryan, and Ed Sands. 2002. "Designing
Collaborative Corporate Cultures." In Creating
Breakthrough Ideas, Bryan Byrne and Susan E.
Squires, editors. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin
and Garvey, pp. 47-69.

Friedman, Ken. 1997. "Design Science and Design
Education." The Challenge of Complexity. Peter
McGrory, editor. Helsinki: University of Art and
Design Helsinki UIAH, 54-72.

--


Eduardo Corte-real wrote:

>First, Dori asked not what was the "design
>research artifact" but the artifact used to
>"convey/communicate design research". In that
>sense although communications of knowledge in
>conferences are also artifacts, I think that, if
>that knowledge do not passes through to an
>audience of practicing (future) designers it
>would almost worthless. I'm thinking about the
>impact of "communication" as I understand from
>Dori's question. I'm also influenced by how
>vital is for design research skills to pass on
>to the future designers. I'm also interested in
>knowing how thrilling and compelling, knowledge
>can be to "artistic minds" such as, at least my,
>Design students.
>
>Second, the tradition of the guilds is not the
>only ancestor for design education or design
>research. I argue that the true ancestor (in
>fact of most design schools) was the Florentine
>Academy of Disegno (in which the Florentine art
>guilds were incorporated in the early 1600's). I
>guess some of us have been repeating the same
>story about the influence of the guilds in the
>construction of Design education that it looks
>true.
>
>Please read Karen-Edis Barzman's The Florentine
>"Academy and the Early Modern State, The
>Discipline of Disegno", CUP (2000), if not take
>a look at monumental Pevsner's Academies of Art,
>Past and Present.
>
>I would say that the aristocratic, higher
>intellectual position of the academics inflated
>to encapsulate all objectual production in the
>1700's and 1800's. The arts and crafts and other
>correspondent European and American movements
>reacted to that and, the same as they have made
>a Myth out Gothic Art, they made a Myth out the
>guild master.
>
>A position that claims that modern designers are
>the intellectual heirs of guilds is: one, not
>true; two, contributes to loath the intellectual
>research skills that since the 1500's were used
>by artists.
>
>It is not by accident that in a great number of
>countries, architects were the first industrial
>or product designers, because that's what
>architects (and sculptors) had been doing for
>the past 400 years: furniture, table ware,
>decorations., etc, and most of the times
>ordering (with drawings) guild masters to
>execute the products.
>
>I like to think that designers are the heirs of
>the intellectual artists founders of the first
>Academy devoted both to serve as knowledge
>producing institution and professional
>education. It is not also an accident that
>painters educated in the highest tradition of
>Fine Arts were the graphic designers.
>
>Amongst others, the central discipline taught in
>the Florentine Academy since 1563! was
>Mathematics (mostly geometry, in fact). Other
>was Dissection of corpses, naturally not
>intended to make beautiful drawings but to
>understand the body mechanics. Another was life
>drawing, not as an artistic expression but as a
>form of inquiry. These and other drawings were
>not secret but highly discussed and shown. The
>Academy, as authorized by Cosimo I, had also the
>designation of Studio, which means University,
>although it was also designated Universitá
>(which meant Guild) and Compagnia, which meant
>association.
>
>If I had to exclude a tradition, as the least
>important to modern designers, I would exclude
>the guild tradition. Even the manual insistence
>in the Bauhaus was a phony one. Think about who
>were the bosses, where they had studied, and
>what they have done previously.