Thank you, Luke, for pointing out the recent article by Nigel Cross.
Nigel Cross (2018) Developing design as a discipline, Journal of
Engineering Design, 29:12, 691-708, DOI: 10.1080/09544828.2018.1537481
It brings into focus, for me, important aspects of the postings that Nigel
made to the list last year (2018).
I offer here a quick tendentious reading.
There is an urgency and an agony in the article. It might seem strange to
refer to a 50 year project as urgent but throughout the various experiments
covered in the article, there is a sense that the issues highlighted must
be addressed – these problems must be solved. Have they been solved?
The agony aspect is probably more useful to me, as a thinker. Wrestling
with a set of interrelated concepts over an academic lifetime is a worthy
sport.
So, where to find this agony in its minimal and foundational form? I quote
from the early part, where the author talks about his undergraduate
experience:
“Although we were shown, and encouraged to look at, examples of good
architecture, I thought it odd that we were never taught how to design.
Since they were not teaching us how to design I didn’t see how they could
reasonably criticise our designing!”
So, “we [students] were never taught how to” design, so how could they
[academics] “reasonably criticise our designing”?
This cry of the frustrated undergraduate goes to the heart of my recent
resigning/retiring as an academic. The complaints being made about me, as
an academic, by students, were that I was lecturing to them rather than
teaching them. How then could I properly evaluate their success at
implementing /performing my teachings when in fact not only did I not teach
them, I actually set out to locate them not as students being taught but as
learners?
“We were shown . . . examples of good architecture“. Showing, in my case,
examples of philosophical methods, by cognitive modelling (thinking in
front of students) is no longer accepted in traditional humanities, let
alone more practical/professional programmes like design. This shift
towards discernible teaching and methodological competence allows for tick
box assessment, (the rubric says. . .). It is part of the infantilising and
feminising of universities.
We charge students money so we must evidence teaching. Everybody gets a HD,
a degree and even, now, often, a PhD.
The article ends with an account of the future that underscores the
disintegration of designing as a culture into class rooms based on what can
be taught about design. This way we can guarantee academic departments,
professorial positions, government grants and captured souls called
students. I quote:
“More broadly, I think the discipline of design could benefit from a much
more progressive and coordinated research programme, rather than the
fragmentation that seems evident today. It needs a solid, collective
viewpoint instead of idiosyncratic, personal views of what constitutes
design research; it needs significant leadership and an honest
acknowledgement from people within the field that we are all still novices
in design research.”
University departments, under conditions of feminisation, need “collective
viewpoints”. “Fragmentation” is to be avoided like a plague of radical
uncertainty because under conditions of radical uncertainty, idiosyncratic
people are the only ones that do well.
“Significant leadership” here is another name for dominance. Getting all of
us to bow our heads as novices is probably the most dangerous call in this
reflective article. Would I go study with a novice? The Leading Novice is
the most dangerous of leaders. Rather a dunce or better yet, a Blakean fool.
In case anyone might think Nigel’s article has convinced me that design
thinking exists as a third way of knowing and that design research exist as
a thing in its own right, and that design is a discipline in its own right,
I have NOT be convinced. Indeed, Nigel’s article more than adequately
announces, for me, the failure of these projects.
Keith Russell
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