Introduction
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We should be aware that there are many different "design educations". Distinction should be made between different:
1 - Design fields (product, graphic, fashion, architecture, etc.)
2 - Education levels (pre-college, undergraduate, graduate, etc.)
3 - Cultural setting (western, eastern european, far-eastern, etc.) [apologies for the euro-centric nomenclature]

This means that in order to avoid misunderstandings, any answer to this question should make the author's assumptions explicit.
I will address these issues as they relate to product design, graphic design, communication design, web design, interaction design, and to some extent architectural design. I have a good working knowledge of all these fields and am an expert in a couple. On the other hand, I have no idea how other fields work (like engineering design, for instance), so I will leave those out (though I will throw in an example of why shunning history is also bad for engineering design).

I was a teacher in technical courses where we trained graphic design and pre-press technicians[2], and in an undergraduate Communication Design program at a private college. My work as a teacher spanned core design skills and many technical disciplines related to graphic design, communication design, web design and interaction design. I will share my views on the subjects under discussion as they relate both to technical training (at the K-12 level) and to undergraduate and graduate college education. My experience of the graduate levels is, up to now, as a MFA and PhD student.

Mine is a particularly portuguese point of view. In Portugal, design college education is very recent. It started at the Faculty of Fine-Arts of the Lisbon University (FBA-UL)[1], and was imbued from the start by modernist ideals in general and by the Bauhaus in particular. Since the late 1990s this focus has shifted and horizons have broaden, but I would say (in my personal opinion) that to some extent this "spirit" is still present.



> 1) How would design education look if you removed all aspects of history from all the subjects in which it has any role? 

It would turn any college education or serious technical education in the design fields listed above into any of the following:
1. A geriatric arts & crafts workshop, 
2. An occupational therapy for brain damaged patients,
3. A mini-Orwellian world (or a Boris Vian novel).

Removing any and all aspects of history would result in something only concerned with the "here and now". Some people might call this "objectivity". I call it "the illusion of objectivity". 
A college education in these fields is supposed to teach you not only HOW to do things, but also to help you find out WHY you do things. And the reasons WHY you do things are always subjective. To suggest that it might be possible to expunge subjectivity from the design process and/or education is naive at best (and pure evil at worst) because, even if you don't see it, the subjectivity is there. Choices were made, just not by you.

It would be an education focused on a certain way to present specific topics selected by the powers that be, with no context or explanation. It might be argued that this is already the case: the whole curriculum, whatever it might be, as well as the particular subjects in each discipline, are of course specific topics selected by a select few. But that's not the problem here. The problem is in trying to present subjective choices as de facto standards rooted in supposedly objective measures.

It is a gross misunderstanding to think that any of the above design fields is something that can simply be left to objective quantitative methods. Personally, I think that the design process is far from mysterious: not only that, but it may in fact be possible to produce a fully functional computer model of the creative process of designers. However, the philosopher's stone required to do that will NOT be found in quantitative methods as it was being discussed here, but instead in a successful computer model of subjectivity. Many crucial design decisions are subjective. Your choice of "primary generator" is certainly subjective. This has been demonstrated over and over.

This subjectivity requires a broader spectrum of cultural awareness than a college education in a field related to hard sciences, and it goes well beyhond deterministic mathematical methods. It also requires the core subjects of design to go deeper than simply mimicking whatever might be seen as the current best practice in the field. And this requires context. Context is the neighboring spatio-temporal field. I can't see how could you possibly represent THAT without some "aspect of history".

On a more technical note, I would add that design education without "all aspects of history" would in fact look very much like a read-only right moving Turing machine. That's not very interesting.




> 2) Would design education be better or worse for it in terms of producing innovative useful designs? 

The answer to this is question is "Obviously, worse." And with a lot of exclamation marks!
This should be obvious because, by now, anyone who delves into subjects such as innovation and creativity should know that:
1 - "Innovative useful" qualifies as a redundancy, because "innovative" is something that is both novel and useful. I didn't bother to check the dictionaries, but anything that is novel and useless is usually called "funny", "strange," "weird," etc., but definitely NOT "innovative".
2 - It has been 20 years since "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention" was first published, in which Csikszentmihalyi presented his extensive research and the resulting systems view of creativity. Since then, this concept has been expanded even further. [3]

It follows that the above mentioned studies of creativity (among many others) have provided substantial evidence that creativity thrives in diversity and freedom of choice. Curtailing the available information has the predictable and demonstratable effect of reducing creative output, both in bandwidth and in quality. This is not open for discussion: it is something that has been measured by empirical research[4]. As such, anyone who claims otherwise will have to present contrary empirical results that disprove the current state of the art.




> 3) What would a subject of Design Studies look like?

It would look like omphaloskepsis.
Excision of "aspects of history" from design education would result in designers with a handicap very similar to brain damage. Without any knowledge of the past, their attention would be absorbed by the "here and now". Then, in their possible version of "Design Studies," they would have to study themselves and their immediate peers.
But how "immediate" are those peers?
We have been silently ignoring the issue of depth: when does the past become "history"?
Once again, the milestones, wherever we put them, are placed according to some subjective reasoning that reflects a particular world view.

The compound term "Design Studies" can only mean the study of designers, design objects, design outcomes, and design theories. Any instance that can be found inside any one of these fields is an entity with a story of its own. That story shares spatio-temporal connections with other entities that simply cannot be left out, when you are trying to make sense of your object of study.
To pry out all "aspects of history" would be to remove all the spatio-temporal connections with other entities. You would be throwing out the baby along with the bath water.



Notes:

[1]  The FBA is an offshoot of the Lisbon Academy of Fine-Arts. Back then it was called Lisbon School of Fine-Arts (ESBAL), and it was independent from any university. University integration is very recent.

[2] This is what some people might call "vocational courses". There were 2-year courses that trained "operators" and 3-year courses that trained "technicians". That categorization was EU-wide. It was clearly stated that operators should know HOW to do things, while technicians should know HOW and WHY. Students were in the 13-17 age group for operators, and 15-21 for technicians. They would get the equivalent of K9 and K12 education levels, respectively. This was a state program to provide an alternative to traditional education. It provided students the respective educational level plus professional skills. Students also had an ongoing internship throughout the duration of the whole course. This program was trying to accomplish 3 things at the same time: 1) Reintegrate students that dropped out from traditional education; 2) Provide students with professional skills; 3) Cater for local labor demand (e.g., where I worked there was a large concentration of printing industries that were potential employers for the students we trained).

[3] Glăveanu, Vlad Petre. “Paradigms in the Study of Creativity: Introducing the Perspective of Cultural Psychology.” New Ideas in Psychology 28, no. 1 (2010): 79–93.

[4] See, for instance, Goldschmidt, Gabriela and Anat Litan Sever. “Inspiring Design Ideas With Texts.” Design Studies 32, no. 2 (2011): 139–55.


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Carlos Pires

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Design & New Media MFA // Communication Design PhD Student @ FBA-UL

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