dear chris,
just to say that i like your post a lot, especially your suggestion to ask students to engage in conversations with users. personally, i recommend the same with all the stakeholders of a potential product, making students aware of being part of an interdisciplinary network of people advancing materially supported cultural practices -- not merely designing a product for industry
cheers
klaus

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of designarena
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2011 2:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On Design Education

Dear all,

A long post...

I've been lurking on the sidelines wondering whether to plunge in, so my comments will address the various threads that have arisen from Don Norman's original contribution. Thanks for an amazing and fruitful discussion so far.

Starting with the last couple of posts, I would never have become the design educator I am now if I had not done a PhD. As a professional design practitioner and before that fine artist and furniture maker, I had a strong intuitive understanding of how and what I wanted to teach and how to engage the students. I was however at a loss to describe how I and the students were doing what we were doing. I was also lucky in that I was based in a very progressive research environment at the University of Southern Denmark, with its user centered and co-design emphasis. I was encouraged to inquire into issues other than those I might have considered if I had been at a more traditional design education institution.

By researching into the how of student and professional design practice I began to reveal for myself and others an incredibly nuanced complexity that I had never considered before and which in turn enrichened my teaching capabilities. These initial steps went on to nurture my current interests in design process altogether and more specifically now an aesthetics of process or aesthetic way of knowing (Carper 1975 ???? - nursing research) that is an inherent part of any collaborative design or participatory innovation endeavour. So how can we educate this way of knowing or educate awareness, as Gibson (????- perception) puts it, in budding design students? I am sorry, but I'm writng this on an iPad without acess to my notes, so citations will have to follow once I get back home.

I also note that as regards the role of PhD's and design research in design education, unless I've missed it, little has been said about the question of funding. Certainly in Denmark and Norway, we've reached the limit of who can be employed to teach based on student income. The only way we can find the extra funding and extra teaching capacity from hopefully Phd's and Post Docs is to generate design and innovation research projects, which are also increasingly interdisciplinary.

I couldn't agree more with Mark Evans that we need both researchers and professional practitioners, both designers and those who have a more artistic leaning. In general I don't understand the either or approach. Many have something to contribute here.

As regards the discussion concerning the craft and skill of design practice with its aesthetic, artistic, material, form, visual and practice sensibilities contra an appeal for a more technologically, business oriented approach coupled with a richer awareness of the social dimension of involving others in a design process, I fail to see that the one cannot supplement the other. There need be no conflict here. 

I think the onus is on leadership and vision to facilitate the good mix.

I am in a unique position now of being able to help educate design students with what are possibly the best workshops in Europe and Scandinavia. Wood, metal, ceramics, you name it. This institution decided to retain what many others let go of. When I first met those involved here, some three years ago and saw what was being achieved, I couldn't help but ask myself:

What else are the students learning and becoming aware of when learning to negotiate their doings and makings with materials? Could it just be that by managing to work with the ongoing change they encounter through the manipulation and working of materials and form that they  also develop the skills that are needed to engage in collaborative design endeavours? To develop their way of knowing? They are after all learning to work with ongoing change and emergence, they have to listen to and sense what is going on, and judge and adjust accordingly. This might sound far fetched, so I can't resist the temptation to introduce Aristotle's notion of techne, poesis and phronesis and their interrelated character that I do believe is the basis of user oriented and collaborative design practice today.

My point here is how can we see the known in a different perspective to release its inherent value in a modern idiom and sense of practice. What is a modern interpretation and sense of craft and skill?

Alternatively one can ask what is it that students miss out on when only learning, for example, to relate to form via 3d CAD? They can loose a sense of scale, context and the interplay between materiality, form and interaction and run the risk of articulating a concept that looks good, but which is inherently flawed. And what do they gain? Speed I daresay and the skill to work with digital material and its particular sense of aesthetics.

Interestingly we are about to engage a dilemma at my institution. A new milling machine built by one of the staff is nearing completion. It will need 3d CAD programming. The dilemma that will arise is how to show the students they will still need to learn to make things by hand in order to acquaint themsleves with material processes in order to produce richer CAD designs? I am sure some of the students will want to take the short cut. And we as educators will need to sharpen our arguments. Through research...? Of course! We are currently working with the notion of weaving back and forth between CAD and rough modelling, enabling the one to inform the other with their own particular qualities.

Which brings me to Don Norman's point about sketching. What is sketching? It is certainly not just about drawing. For the past 10 years I have been educating design students at both BA and MA level who entered the programs with no drawing skills at all. Most went on to become very good designers. We developed a technique we call Tinkering or as some also call bricollage. I can provide a link to some examples when I get home. It is the means whereby one can describe very roughly with found materials what it is that one understands about a design proposal "for now." That can change. This method is also used as a means to cultivate a collaborative design approach whereby designers are encouraged to bring their various interpretations as tinkered objects to the table from which a collaborative synthesis can then made. The synthesis object or sketch now acting as an articulation of those involved. This is very difficult to do with 3d CAD. I acknowledge however that there is still a need for CAD and automated milling processes when necessary.

Incidentally Tinkering is now being developed as a field of interest in both design and conversational analysis research and will form the basis for one track, as I understand it, at the upcoming PIN - C conference, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology. I'm sure Ken Friedman can fill you in on the details.

My main point being is that it is not a question of either, or, but of how we want students to become more aware both through their own practice and by relating to the practice and research of others.

How can we encourage the dialogue between these various approaches? 

Unfortunately the discussion often verges on the religious, as though something is old fashioned and something modern! What is it that we do as human beings that can contribute to design practice? How can we learn from the way we get things done that can then inform design education? Our inherent resources are neither old fashioned nor modern. It is more a question of how can we better understand ways and means of leveraging those resources. We know and can do a lot more than we think we know and can do!

Finally, as regards encouraging students to become more aware of the systemic nature of what they are designing both as product or service and as culturally and socially loaded contributions, I would suggest that it is how one sets the project brief for the students that can either encourage a more or less sytemic approach.

For example, I sincerely believe that a significant role for designers is that of identifying opportunities. By engaging users and their contexts designers can see new possibilities, without any prior brief. I asked 2nd year BA interaction design engineer students to consider the issue of "Child nutrition and dirty water." I neither told them which users or issues to work with. To my amazement they developed not one, but three interrelated concepts that ranged from a UV pocket scanner, well building equipment and a pr, educational program to inform families of the ethical and health problems of using powdered milk as a substitute for breast feeding. They also became very good at tinkering around such abstract notions as that of ethics to help them gain insights into what they were dealing with.

Over the years this approach has been further developed, and I do think that by keeping the brief open to allow students to make their own interpretations of a task encourages a more systemic approach to their design proposals. By identifying with a design task and allowing for varied interpretation students do discover the larger whole than if they are pointed in a very specific direction.

Can one design education encompass all this? I believe so. But being very process oriented, I would say that it is understandjng what lies at the heart of collaborative and individual design practice, the soul of it's how, from practice and research perspectives that will lead to alternative design education contributions and approaches. It is certainly my experience. This rather than a focus on whether a program is called product design, industrial design or something else. Design practice is so complex now that I don't think any one liner description will suffice. Quite apart from the fact that the very title of the program will inevitably lead to students engendering preconceptions as to what they think they are getting involved with and which are all too often off track with what they can otherwise do.

So what is it that we are educating design students to do?

I will never forget a colleague's response when I was at Olin College of Engineering, USA, as to how he considered engineering education. At Olin we educate people not engineers was the prompt response.

Something here...?

My best regards,

Chris.

-------------

from:

Chris Heape PhD

Head of Institute, Head of Research
The Institute for Product Design
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences - HiOA
Norway

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On 07/10/2011, at 16.27, Don Norman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> re the conversation thread "Design Education: Brilliance without Substance"
> 
> The sole purpose of this note is to change the words in the subject
> line. Those of us who use google mail to read email find that Google
> puts all the emails into one "conversation," which although often
> nice, makes it really difficult to read when there are as many emails
> on the topic as we have now. Giving it a new name starts a new
> conversation thread.
> 
> I have been traveling during this conversation so I have been trying
> hard to read each item, even if I cannot respond. Its a great
> discussion. But I am sure I have missed some items because they are in
> the middle of this long stack and i can't see them. When I finally get
> home Tuesday I will expand the items are make sure i have read every
> one.
> 
> Don