Terry, Peter, Ken, and colleagues,
Terry got what I was trying to get across when he wrote "Chuck has identified that something in the spirit of change of IBM needs to be applied to design education. Ken has argued against design thinking. Peter is suggesting we have been doing design thinking... What seems clear is design education needs to improve by doing something different.”
Then he added "Over time, it became clear that design courses could be made highly attractive to students and a highly profitable cash cow for the university as a whole without any obvious loss in educational quality because there was no expectation of a high standard in academic theory in design. In short, in many programs the acceptable standard was whatever was produced.
I suggest 'design thinking' was what led to quality problems in design education and design research.
Its clear there are advantages in improving the quality of theory, education and research in design disciplines.
The question is how? On evidence, a simple application of design thinking doesn’t seem to be the best tool."
I think Terry dropped a stitch here by failing to say what design thinking was involved in his cynical view of universities making design popular in order to raise money without improving quality or the competence of students.
Peter, thankfully, did a good job of updating current efforts to improve how modern views of design thinking are changing research and education in some design schools .
Ken’s remarks, especially his first reply to my post about IBM pointed to the problems, but only after Peter’s reply, did he start referencing active solutions. I wrote this in response and include it now: "Your response to this post is another instance of our different approaches to the world. You seem to assume that there needs to be some central authority or client to commission a common model of education or research to apply to every school of design. I assume that every researcher, educator, and practitioner can apply design thinking (as defined in A Theory of Design thinking) to better understand and improve any aspect of design that interests them. If individuals do this, collaboration and idea sharing can arise and lead to collaboration, or individuals can identify with what they feel is good, recognize common goals, find consensus and even generate a new paradigm. The story of how the President of IBM found the person to lead the company in a new direction is a story about one committed individual who thought about things differently than IBM had traditionally done. It did take a President with vision, intelligence, and courage to search for and recognize that individual. But it certainly is the individual that was already committed to the vision that is implementing it. Give both individuals the credit they deserve. Its time people "who remain in place" understand that change is always necessary, and work to assure that it is positive and progressive even when not as good as it could be.” Hopefully, some PhD candidate will take the whole effort at IBM as their dissertation subject and tell us what worked and what didn’t.
Another example of an enlightened approach to introducing design competence to a large organization is the effort President Obama has made to upgrade government performance after the debacle related to the launching of Obamacare. In an emergency response to fix everything that didn’t work at launch, many outstanding systems designers were brought in from places like Google and Apple to address the problems. Their success led the President to convince several of them, and those they respected from other large companies to stay on to build a permanent team and infrastructure to address administrative and communications problems throughout the US Government. A small cadre of the best qualified were assigned to build policy and infrastructure across the entire government, a second larger cadre of highly respected and skilled professionals was set up to take on especially troubled branches of government such as the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and finally a third tier of expert professionals were assigned to various departments to effectuate and coordinate best practices, and introduce new system technology. This was reported in the magazine, Fast Company, as a stealth operation initiated by the President but hasn’t received the attention and study it deserves.
Or, so I believe,
Chuck
Charles Burnette
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