David –
At the risk of escalating something that appears to have originated off-list, I am going to weigh in — once — on your comments regarding my talk with Koç University PhD students.
First and foremost, Ken Friedman is accurate. A smart group of PhD students sent good and earnest questions. I answered them, and they edited and shared the videos with the list. What you don’t see is the written material that I sent referring students to readings not covered in the discussion. I believe that the students’ future as educators is as important as their future as researchers. They will inherit the professoriate we leave behind, and much of their research will reside in the political climate of higher education.
My curricular perspective has been formed by 45 years in university-level teaching, administration, and pedagogical research. My work spans K-12 student populations in large-scale government research studies, university students at all levels, and members of professional associations who find themselves unprepared for the future by their college education. I have conducted nearly 100 on-campus curricular reviews and consultations in the US and abroad, including Australia. I've read another 250 curricular accreditation and international equivalency self-studies. And I am currently reviewing each and every one of the nearly 600 practitioner/educator assessments submitted under Don Norman’s international effort to rethink design education, a good barometer of what people think needs to be done worldwide. In other words, I have seen and read a lot in excruciating detail.
I did a quick search of published visual communication design curricula, course descriptions, and learning outcomes from three Australian institutions with which you appear to have some affiliation as an adjunct. In each case, undergraduate coursework is defined mostly by artifact or medium and literally interchangeable with US curricula. A meaningful difference is the additional non-design study in four-year American degree programs. And with regard to national standards, you might want to review those of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, which we developed in collaboration with AIGA and IDSA — there is no absence of people-centered criteria, approved ten years ago by nearly 400 member institutions. So I don’t find your assessment of the starting point for curricular reconsideration especially convincing.
Citing the Information Design Journal (which celebrates "the effectiveness of content put into form”) and the US election ballot also provides some insight. The appearance of the ballot is an easy fix as an information design problem, however, not so easy as a systems-level problem in a country of 350 million people (speaking 430 different languages) that administers its ballots under fifty different state regulations and a plethora of local voting technologies. You inadvertently made my point. Today’s communication design problems are no longer a matter of cognitively efficient and functionally usable artifacts alone. With increases in the complexity of problems, design responses must also be technologically feasible, economically viable, organizationally scalable, environmentally sustainable, culturally contextual, socially equitable, and ethically responsible. How to build those competencies in young designers is the issue.
I believe we are in a paradigm shift under which anomalies accumulate, complexity accelerates, and decisions have consequences well beyond the boundaries of traditional fields. As Thomas Kuhn warned us, the shift is a time when die-hards dig in their heels, stretching the existing paradigm, relaxing standards, or assigning responsibility to someone else in accounting for anomalous problems. At the same time, he tells us the shift is likely a period of highly productive, rapid testing of new theories. I’m arguing for the latter.
Meredith
> On Oct 26, 2020, at 2:03 AM, David Sless <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi Ken,
>
> I went back to the link and listened very carefully to what Meredith Davis was saying.
>
> My understanding remains unchanged. She spoke very eloquently. But she was talking about USA undergraduate design courses and what they have to do in the future to meet today’s challenges. She contrasted the contemporary need with the contemporary teaching STILL rooted in the Bauhaus tradition.
>
> I was shocked by her comments about the USA. I know very little about USA undergraduate design courses. I do know that there are many courses around the world, including some pioneering work I did in the 1960s and 70s that was a response to these changes which we saw then, not now!
>
> For those of you who are on the same page as I am, we have moved in the last 20 years from people centred design to setting standards for people centred design. We no longer talk about improvement. Our concern is with acceptable minimum social standards and we have done the research to show that the standards are achievable today. The process of teaching undergraduates how to achieve these standards are happening now.
>
> The USA is obviously an exception, as we can all see in the appalling design of ballot papers for the USA election.
>
> These are matters of deep concern, not occasions for celebration that the change is coming!
>
> David
>
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