Dear Charlotte Magnusson
Your reply touched a chord.
Designers may need and already use a certain kind of math that is more Designerly and accessible in the form of image rather that just numerical or algebraic or even in quantum form.
In 1976 I helped create a course in Geometry for our Foundation students at NID that tried to bring abstract expressions to life through image and expressions of relations in the form of models both two and three dimensional. This course still survives in its form in which we created it then and design students journey through math terrain at a fairly complex level using diagrams and paper and wood models. As diversions we used math recreational puzzles and articles from Scientific American by Martin Gardner as well as Phillip Morrison along with their books and films by Carl Sagan, Phillip Morrison, Charles and Ray Eames. They journeyed into crystallography and morphology as well as geodesic domes and light weight structures as expressions of natures geometry. They had assignments in symmetry and space filling all the time coordinated with discourses on the philosophical dimensions of math and structure as well as exposure to books by world leaders in Islamic Patterns, Growth and Form in Nature and these assignments included doing as well as presentation of unique discoveries and not just prescribed constructions that were the hallmark of high school geometry in those days. It was an exciting journey for both teachers as well as students. The course evolved to include orthographic communication and paper models of Platonic and Archemedian solids with high precision in paper which was followed by analysis of these solids to discover the amazing symmetries hat are held within. Them came the Flower assignment when an organic fragrant object landed on their drawing board to be subjected to an analysis along many axis and each student had their own example to be captured in six frames of 10 by 10 inch or 30 by 30 cms. All assignments were flavoured by non-prescriptive orientation so that exploration was encouraged and early assignments encouraged self practice to get their skills to be fine tuned. These are perhaps the foundations of non-periodic architecture of M C Escher and Haresh Lalvani? I had also put together a multi screen slide lecture using images from nature, architecture as well as molecular structures to illustrate the vast range of forms at many scales, from the microscopic to the galactic scale which was delivered to each batch of students. This slide set in 35 mm colour transparency still exists in the NID Library archive I believe. I hope itis used today in the age of YouTube and internet slide shares!
Is this math education for the designer? We also brought in symmetry software and some assignments were done on the early computers that arrived at NID in the early 80s as the course evolved and took its final form as it is taught today as well. Several of my students from those days are design teachers and they too continue this tradition.
I can share all the assignments and insights from these explorations on my Academia.edu website if any one is interested but my old notes from this class is still awaiting further processing lie so many other design education experiments across a number of design theory and practice courses that are lying in my archive of notes and papers (dusty hard copies) as well as digital notes from the 90s and beyond. Must pull them out of all the boxes and roll up my sleeves it seems!
Terry can be exasperating in his way but some things that he says may not be totally irrelevant to the future of design education especially with the aid of computational facilities that are at hand. In Product design we find that design students can benefit from introduction to primitive programming with the use of new electronic kits and software languages that were alien to the 60 s and 70s design education. Perhaps the question should be what kinds of math would we include in the future curriculum of the designer and in what form will these be offered?
What do yo think?
With warm regards
M P Ranjan
From my iPad at home
9 May 2014 at 11.10 pm IST
Prof M P Ranjan
Independent Academic, Ahmedabad
Author of blog : http://www.designforindia.com
Archive of papers : http://cept.academia.edu/RanjanMP
Sent from my iPad
> On 09-May-2014, at 8:36 pm, Charlotte Magnusson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> As someone who does know quite a bit of maths (I did my PhD in theoretical physics) I must admit I find this thread mystifying. Maths is a type of representation that can be powerful for some things, but not for others. Sometimes it can be used to express things in a very compressed way - I have a reprint of Newton's work and there are no mathematical expressions in there - the descriptions are verbal, which makes some of them much lengthier than their more modern mathematical versions. Depending on the field of design I would expect images, sketches, models to be more powerful and useful - and then again for other types of design there should be other tools.
>
> But I might be missing the point...
> /Charlotte
>
> Charlotte Magnusson
> Associate Professor
> Certec, Division of Rehabilitation Engineering Research
> Department of Design Sciences Lund University
> Lund
> Sweden
> tel +46 46 222 4097
> fax +46 46 222 4431
>
>
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