Dear Mike,
Your idea of using Epistemological bailiwicks to replace traditional
disciplines is a great idea. My apologies for being so slow to answer.
There is an alternative to what has been suggested so far.
Most proposals for changing education are a zero sum game. You can cut the
cake in different ways. You can take out some topics and replace them with
other topics. At the end of the day, though, the size of the learning cake
remains the same.
The following describes an approach that enables students and teachers to go
beyond this and in the same time and for the same effort have many learning
cakes - and bigger cakes as well. From experience the alternative described
below is effective in terms of improving design skills across multiple
design fields and also in significantly improving learning outcomes.
The background is the observation that humans are much the same wherever and
whoever. Humans think, feel, reason and conceptualise the world similarly
in all disciplines.
The disciplinary knowledge structures, abstract concepts and reasoning of
all disciplines are very similar. This is to the point that you can see the
same abstract concepts used in many different disciplines.
Imagine a big treasure chest of abstract concepts. The abstract concepts
can be taken from the treasure chest and used in combinations in different
disciplines as the basis for theory and understanding in those disciplines.
They have different names in the different disciplines but the underlying
abstract concepts that are used in each discipline have the same kind of
form, structure, purpose and effects.
This offers an opportunity.
Only teach abstract concepts and the reasoning needed to combining them
effectively. Teach these things independently of disciplines.
Then, show how the abstract concepts have been used in different
disciplines and their theories. Show this across many disciplines.
The result is that, in the same time, learners can come to understand many
different fields and their theories in the same time. Even better, they are
then able to draw on and bring together theories and knowledge from
different fields into new better integrated bodies of knowledge.
For disciplines that involve professional practice, this approach provides a
powerful tool for participating effectively in multidiscipline projects as
well as taking into account a wide variety of contextual issues in a single
discipline project.
Good mixes of abstract concepts for design seem to be those of sociology,
anthropology, ethography, ethology, communication, ethics, ecology,
eco-systems, political theory and geo-politics, economics, psychology,
architecture, neuro-science, art, organisational management, behaviour in
organisations, systems thinking, aesthetics, electronics, engineering and
operations research.
The main differences across the disciplines are that some disciplines use
more abstract concepts than others, and the distribution of use of
difficult and complex abstract concepts differs across disciplines.
The processes both learning the abstract concepts and applying them to
different disciplinary issues in design can be supercharged significantly,
if the learning of abstract concepts is done via mathematical
representations - especially those abstract concepts in the social and
behavioural sciences, psychology and the humanities.
Myself and many others have experienced this learning approach in the UK.
It appears to be also used in some courses in Australia.
Best wishes,
Terry
PS. If anyone finds these ideas useful in their writing please reference my
posts in phd-design as in any published medium.
---
Dr Terence Love
BA(Hons) PhD(UWA), PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
--
We are currently looking at updating the structure of our BDes programme and
are considering whether this is an opportunity to move away from traditional
discipline silos. One such consideration is to base our programme on an
epistemological basis, identifying, if possible, different types of
knowledge, or possibly even basing it on human behaviour. Instead of having
a traditional structure where at the top are disciplines, i.e. Communication
Design, Industrial Design, Fashion Design etc, we could consider an
epistemological, bailiwick structure. The bailiwicks could be knowledge
based. For example a bailiwick titled 'modality', could cover areas of
design relevant to how we make personal meaning and how we experience the
world. This could relate to areas such as observational drawing, colour
theory, perception, cognition and so forth. A bailiwick (or mode) titled
'strategy' could relate to how we make meaning for others and might be
recognised within traditional discipline areas such as graphics,
advertising, etc. However, no discipline would have ownership of these
knowledge bailiwcks. And that would be one of the key differences. The key
purpose to this is to create fluidity between specialisms, break down the
bastions of traditional knowledge and to see a greater connectedness between
design disciplines. The disciplines themselves can still exist, as they
become the means by which knowledge is created; but they become no longer
self contained knowledge structures.
I would welcome my international colleagues insights, ideas, opinions,
examples of future focused design education structures.
Regards
Mike
Dr. MIKE MCAULEY
SENIOR LECTURER, SUBJECT DIRECTOR,
ILLUSTRATION
Institute of Communication Design
College of Creative Arts
Massey University
Museum Building
Buckle Street
Wellington
http://creative.massey.ac.nz<http://creative.massey.ac.nz/>
________________________________
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
