Greetings Don, and all,
Thanks for making your paper available to the list. I broadly agree with your proposal for a curriculum for design education in 21st century. I expect that many list members would desire to work in programmes with the kind of design curriculum you propose. And I expect that there are many out there who would be less enthusiastic.
It strikes me that your proposed curriculum implies more than adopting new subject knowledge, it also implies culture and identity change. It’s common for academic staff to perform several different roles in the university, such as professional practitioner, teacher and researcher. Some academic staff will probably identify more predominantly with one role than another. Some might see themselves as designers or artists who do a bit of teaching to supplement their income. Some might see themselves as researchers for whom teaching is something that gets in the way of their research and supervision of PhD students. Indeed, you mention the issue of culture and identity in your section “Bootstrapping the Training of PhDs” (pp. 44-45).
“We could consciously iterate both curriculum and culture, impressing upon our students that we are educating them through a transformation from design practitioners to design scientists… none of these requirements are technically difficult, but they do require a change in mindset for those who have only encountered design taught as a craft.”
For many design teachers, changing their mindset from being a design practitioner to being a design scientist will also involve forming a new teacher identity. Professional expertise, while important for credibility, is not sufficient for the new kind of teaching role your curriculum implies. Design teachers will require the kind of foundational subject knowledge you propose in your curriculum, and they will require didactic knowledge required for designing learning processes, and pedagogical knowledge related to understanding human thought, behaviour and communication. Consequently, the kind of change in mindset you propose also implies forming a new teacher identity. This kind of change in mindset you propose will involve convincing many design teachers to change their identity from being an expert design practitioner to being a novice design educationist. This will be a big ask for some.
In this regard, I think your point about implementation is apposite: “Without attention to and supervision of the details of implementation, ensuring that the requirements and interests of multiple stakeholders are addressed and tensions among them resolved, the design will fail” (p.19). Convening the study group to create the curriculum will likely be the easier part. Implementing culture and identity change process will take some time and effort.
Best regards,
Luke
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Luke Feast, Ph.D. | Industrial Design | Senior Lecturer | Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies | Auckland University of Technology | New Zealand | Email [log in to unmask] | +64 9 921 9999 ext 6017
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