A brief interjection on the design education thread:
I'm currently guest lecturer at AHO — the Oslo School of Architecture and Design — and through that experience I have started to get my thoughts in order. I'll stay far away from the artillery shells of the senior design specialists here as I am thoroughly out of my depth in addressing Design Education writ large. I'll say only this, and from my perspective as Director at The Policy Lab:
1. There may be some value in aligning educational conduct (i.e. what we teach and how) with actual evolving design practice.
2. That means, as designers (at least some designers) are pushing the boundaries of design practice into new areas (or are helping shape and re-conceptualize familiar areas), it seems pretty clear to me that they nevertheless lack some of the needed intellectual skills required to properly engage those new practices from a degree of professionalism.
3. Mapping those gaps between the "know-how" and the "need-to-know" seems less a theoretical task than a pragmatic one to keep education both current and innovative.
4. My immediate concern is that students are not really being prepared for the work they think they are going into, and more to the point, they don't know they aren't prepared because their education is so distant from the social sciences and other fields necessary to illuminate their own gaps.
As The Policy Lab is now cooperating with numerous design firms and schools in order to design new services, I can experience first-hand their skill sets in tasks such as interviewing, structuring research, differentiating research questions from interview questions, and rendering interpretations on findings. Among other things.
Just like undergraduates entering a first-year class on qualitative research methods, these students are totally unprepared for serious research.This is only one slice of the larger pie you are all discussing, to be sure. This would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that design schools are not establishing in their students the foundational intellectual skills needed to conduct the work they then assign to the students.
At The Policy Lab, we are increasingly convinced that the design juncture is the key nexus for attention in crafting policy and programming.
There is a brave new world to be discovered in separating "designing" from "decision making" in democratic processes in recognizing that design puts options on the table, while decision making removes them from the table. That small, conceptual shift (of both inserting design, and distinguishing design) could fundamentally alter how we approach major public challenges (almost all of which fall under the common design rubric of "wicked problems").
The challenge may be design. The question is whether designers will be the ones to contribute to that challenge. As of this very moment, I'm not so sure.
Derek.
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On Oct 5, 2011, at 3:19 AM, Andrew J King wrote:
> Don Norman's abstract of his article for Core77 on design education seems to echo exactly the thesis of an article I read in the old UK Chartered Society of Designers journal, probably in the mid 80's.
>
> Being currently on the other side of the planet, I don't have access to my paper archives, so I can't offer a reference. The article was mainly concerned with furniture design rather than product, but the general gist was similar: design education remains too much based in craft and craft skill, and not enough in education for industrial design. That this should still be an issue is profoundly worrying, but I think it goes much deeper: Since the collapse of the Modernist consensus, undergraduate design education seems to be mired in a crisis of theory: What to teach and how? This would be a happy and creative opportunity were it not that, too often, it seems to be an unrecognised crisis, or at least, one unrecognised by those who ought to be doing something about it. That it has been going on for so long, is a tragedy, and I sometimes feel we are in danger of 'losing design' altogether, in the sense of losing all recognition of it, in the specialisms of the academy and in public perception, as an integrative discipline, and not a mere collection of assorted industrial crafts.
>
> With new technologies of manufacturing beginning to mount an assault on the last bastions of skill, it seems to be ever more urgent that design education re-invents itself and shows that it is something bigger and more important than the ever more fragmented specialisms that seem to be popular in many colleges.
>
> Andrew J King
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On 5 Oct 2011, at 09:16, Don Norman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> For your amusement (or perhaps annoyance). My latest essay on design
>> education on the core77.com website:
>>
>> Design Education: Brilliance without Substance
>> http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/design_education_brilliance_without_substance_20364.asp
>>
>> We are now in the 21st century, but design curricula seem stuck in the mid
>> 20th century, except for the addition of computer tools . . .
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