Carma, Gunnar, Amanda, Alun, Ken, et al,

Although traveling at the moment I have found myself with a few free hours. What better way to spend that time then by engaging in this conversation, which has become stimulating over the last few days.

As mentioned by several contributor, there are challenges in teaching design that go beyond the topic. For me, three come to mind almost immediately: Academic requirements of the program; operational demands of the institution; and the cultural environment. Before proceeding, however, I must provide a context for my own comments. Anything that I post has to be seen and understood in the context of my academic milieu at ASU, which in many ways, is based on the art-and-design model; a large (70K students) public, research-intensive university as an operational model (not a small, private institution); and a cultural environment (i.e. Arizona) that is mixed and diverse. So, what does this mean when teaching entry-level design students?

First, the student numbers are exceptionally large, even in design. Until recently, my freshman-level course called Design Awareness had 400-450 students each semester. By the way, these were not all design students. I always have a great representation from engineering, business, education, psychology and other disciplines across the university. Second, the design disciplines, with their adherence to an ethos of making and doing in the tradition of the arts, appear to be at odds with a large part of the university, which is involved in research and scholarship. Last, it would be a stretch of the imagination to consider Phoenix and Arizona as centers of design, at least not in the way that we consider Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as centers of design.

Therefore, I took a page out of E. D. Hirsch's book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, when I developed the aforementioned course. That is, what general knowledge should someone have to understand the phenomenon that we call design? To achieve this end, I have developed a contextual approach because I needed to go beyond the type of curricula of segmented content found in many schools, i.e. courses in design history, design theory, design methods, etc., and envision a learning experience based on contextual awareness. Furthermore, I used the analogy of a journey to a foreign place in order to make students understand design and its place in our artificial environment. When considering a trip to a foreign country, it would not be at all unusual to learn a bit of the language or some of its social norms and behavioral patterns. Perhaps aspects of climate, geography and topography would also be helpful. The same goes for the course. Students need to get a basic understanding of the visual language, human patterns in design, cultural values, environmental impact, etc. None are dealt in depth. Such depth occurs in courses to follow. However, Design Awareness provides an overall framework.

In the end, I position design in this contextual model because it is my opinion that freshman design students need to understand that design is not this rarefied and elitist activity only done by equally rare and elitist people. What they need to understand before anything else is that everyone designs everywhere. This is how we have created our artificial world going back at least 2.5 million years, and how we are creating our world today. Once this concept is understood, it becomes easier to introduce other concepts that are more recent and  more specific, those that have become part of the evolution of design as a human activity. This is where Carma's suggestion of exposure to issues such as feminism, Marxism, functionalism and so on fits in and makes sense – because these topics now occurs in context.

Returning to Hirsch, you cannot fully understand a culture without an understanding some of its basic cultural elements and values. For a phrase such as 'Rome was not built in a day' to mean anything, a person needs to have some sense of what Rome is and what a day is. The same phenomenon exists for design. We need to know some fundamental and broad elements of design (with a small 'd') before we can proceed with a fuller understanding of its many components.

Jacques

Jacques Giard PhD
Professor of Design
The Design School

480.965.1373
http://jrgiard.macmate.me/jrgiard/Welcome.html
Go Green!  Please do not print this e-mail unless it is completely necessary.




On 9/6/12 2:11 PM, "Carma Gorman" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Hi, Gunnar.

Thanks for your reply. To be very clear, in suggesting that critical
theory from the humanities is germane to design education, I am in no
way arguing for cloning myself. It seems clear to me that the world
(alas) does not need more art historians. Nor am I a fan of theory for
theory's sake: in fact I have extremely little patience for theory
that isn't obviously useful to me in understanding something about
real life.

Indeed, I don't think there's anything particularly remote or abstract
about Marxism and feminism and functionalism and so on. These ideas
are tied to exactly the kinds of decisions consumers make every day,
and to the decisions designers themselves must make when they consider
how something should be made, for whom, out of what materials, by
whom, and where. I want my students to know something about feminism
and gender studies so they can anticipate why, for example, many
female (and male) viewers found Clorox 2's "Mom will never know" ad
offensive (I have in mind http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rclLQC_T0o).
I want them to know at least a smidgen about ergonomics and disability
studies so that they can consider how an elderly user might judge the
success of a pill bottle design or a Social Security website. I want
them to have some familiarity with Marxism so they have some way to
understand consumers who object to purchasing clothing made in
sweatshops, and so they have some way to understand what Adbusters (or
Occupy Wall Street, for that matter), is about.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm interested in a course (or a
curriculum) that teaches "applied theory" (not sure what else to call
it) in ways that relate very specifically to the design professions.
In fact, I already teach a four-week unit of that sort within a
semester-long undergraduate course called "History, Theory, and
Criticism of Graphic Design." I just wish I had more time to allocate
to it, and a smaller class format, so that it would be a
discussion-and-writing seminar rather than a large lecture course.

I'm curious to know if anyone else teaches a course of this sort, or
would find it useful to have their students take such a course.

On another note, I agree with you, Gunnar, that even the most tedious
arguments on this list sometimes contain pearls of wisdom, or can
serve to help clarify one's own position (even if by way of contrast).
However, when I have students in my classes who talk too much--who
dominate the discussion to such an extent that the other students clam
up in protest--then I ask the talkative students to throttle back so
that others can be heard. (Actually, truth be told, I try not to let
the situation get to that point, because it's pretty hard to undo the
damage once this dynamic emerges). I don't tell the domineering
students to stop talking entirely; I just ask them to be more
selective about when they speak. I think the situation on this list is
comparable. Except that I'm not the teacher--I've instead been one of
the disaffected students who waits in vain for someone to tell the
frequent talkers to say less, if only to see what new kinds of voices
might emerge.

(Now I'm worrying I'm talking too much.)

Carma Gorman