Ken, Terry and others,
I believe that the focus on maths per se is inappropriate for design. The focus should be on abstraction, combinatorics (the purposeful structuring and analysis of abstractions), and appropriate synthesis and communication of goal oriented processes that seek to improve focal subjects or circumstances. To the extent that maths are useful to these considerations they should be introduced with them. Those with maths in their background would be attracted to design by the issues involved. This awareness should be heightened through effective research and communication about “designerly" approaches to abstraction, structuring, and goal oriented processes within design disciplines. These efforts should seek input from qualified advisors or researchers from other disciplines. Engineers, medical doctors, and other systematic thinkers are attracted to design precisely because it is design. People who become interested in another discipline are the ones that bring them together, not curricula introduced from the top.
Or so I believe,
Chuck
On May 3, 2014, at 3:07 AM, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Here, we are talking about design students. These people are developing foundations in the skills they need to move from competence to mastery in design. It is from this cohort that we would need to find students who are ALSO developing the foundations they need to move from competence to mastery in mathematics. If they do not arrive at university with a high level of competence, they will not achieve the kinds of mathematical fluency that Terry (2014) describes, a capacity for “mastering abstraction and meta-abstraction along with predicting dynamic behaviors in multi-dimensional spaces, going beyond linear four-dimensional understanding of the world, understanding and using limits and disjoints, moving between discrete and continuous, combinatorics and design theory (different from what is known as design theory in the design industry), understanding the calculus of change and feedback, and moving between set and metrological mapping of concepts.”
>
> Second, assuming that we can find students with foundations for both sets of skills, how are we to find time within the design curriculum to bring students to MASTERY in both?
>
>
>
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