Dear Ranjan,
Thank you for raising the issue of responsibility of designers and the role
of design educators.
In your post on agency and Soros you asked a key question (about designers
creating designs that result in adverse consequences)
" Can we make the mission of creating responsible designer in education
something that would include the processing and anticipation of these
outcomes as part of the design process?"
I'm puzzled as to why this is not the central tenet of all design courses.
It would seems to be basic to professional competence of designers and
design education?
The need for such basic skills and responsibility is very obviously true for
training designers to work in 4H realms (high risk, high uncertainty, high
cost of failure, high technology). One would expect a design education
program training people to design nuclear power stations or computerised
automated surgery robots to be trained to anticipate and design out adverse
consequences. In reality, this is already central to those forms of design
education. Such design education programs are typically subject to detailed
scrutiny and careful accreditation of educators, curriculum and assessment
processes - and typically require accredited continuing professional
development both for educators and those accredited by the design course.
The same package of design skills and responsibility seems no less relevant
for designers in other realms.
For example those creating designs for a public health promotion that
expends large amounts of public funds and fails to engender the intended
results to the cost of all in society; a book cover design that does not
pay its way as intended; a sound system that has long term adverse effects
on users hearing; the design of touch interfaces likely to lead to ergonomic
injuries if used in commercial settings; designs that encourage crime, etc.
Ken and yourself touched on this dimension of responsibility in your posts
on 'agency' .
Your question points to the benefits from making design educators and
designers responsible for design outcomes.
The most obvious way of doing this in ways that protect all concerned is by
careful accreditation that includes evaluation of the teaching of designers
to be able to reliably and accurately predict the behaviour of the outcomes
resulting from their design outputs. For some design education programs
this might likely require additional programs to teach these design skills?
The introduction of accreditation offers benefits for all concerned - design
educators, designers, organisations buying design services, users and
society at large.
The Design Research Society has started an accreditation system for design
researchers via its Fellowship assessment process. The next step would seem
to be accreditation of undergraduate programs against standards of
professional responsibility for anticipating design outcomes and addressing
them - as you suggested.
Best wishes,
Terence
==
Dr Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
PhD, B.A. (Hons) Eng, P.G.C.E
School of Design and Art, Curtin University, Western Australia
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
[log in to unmask] +61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
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