Meredith Davis recently gave a talk to students which has been released as
a series of videos.

The discussion about the talk has been interesting.

I wrote this essay about a week ago but decided not to send it.  However,
the recent re=emergence of the discussion -- and most importantly, the
comments by a few readers that they found it useful, has caused me to
slightly revise and post this.

Here is what was wrong with Meredith's talk:   The problem is that it was
(is) so necessary.  It is time to stop talking about these issues and
instead, to do something about it.

The number of people discussing the nature of design and, in particular,
design education is large. Many wise and intelligent voices have been
offered. That is the thinking part. How many of these ideas have been
implemented? Design education, in the majority of schools, is still mired
in the 1900s -- the early1900s. There are wonderful exceptions, but the
majority of places still teach design as a craft. Crafts are wonderful and
many of the results make our lives more enjoyable.

But crafts will not solve the many major societal issues in the world. We
need to take the tools of design to address the critical issues facing us:
health, education, housing, hunger ... the list of 17 major sustainable
development goals posted by the United Nations.  https://sdgs.un.org/goals The
skills of designers can address these issues, but only if design education
changes, so that future designers understand history and culture, politics
and economics, business and technology, the better to enable designers to
work with (and ideally, lead) multidisciplinary teams, local communities,
and the many different subject-matter experts.

Meredith is actually trying to do something about this. She is part of a
group trying to suggest curricula for the 21st century, a large ambitious
project that will take several years. Approximately 600 people from around
the world have volunteered to help. We have been working on this project
for most of this year (2020). We have barely started: we expect that we
will require a few more years. It is sponsored by IBM's Design group (with
some 2,500 designers), the World Design Organization, and UC San Diego's
Design Lab. The people who have volunteered to help include designers at
all levels, from students to Deans, practitioners and academics. We have
senior executives of major industries as well as numerous Deans of Design
Schools across the world.
(https://www.futureofdesigneducation.org/)

I have read all the material that these volunteers wrote describing their
interests and their recommendations for what needs to be done. It took
roughly 20 hours of reading spread out over 4 days.  Many of the essays are
long, thoughtful, and intelligent. Inspiring. Convincing reinforcement that
it is time to stop talking about design education and time to do something
about it.

Many of the respondents complain about the poor quality of their design
education. Faculty members complained about how difficult it is (sometimes
impossible) to get those in charge of design curricula to change.

The people came from Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe,
and North America.  Many described their childhood in underprivileged,
impoverished neighborhoods and countries, often the first of their family
to become educated. (Many now reside in Europe or The United States.)  They
told of their struggles and hopes. And their disappointments.  They
discussed the problems of education in their home countries: Mexico and
South America, Africa, and India were the regions most frreuently cited,
but every continent where design training takes place was represented. The
discused discrimination against them because of their gender, race, or
countro of origin.  Some respondents are still working and living in their
country of birth: some have moved to Europe and North America. All want the
education to change.

Many speak strongly of the need  to open design education to a larger
population of people -- different cultures, diffrent races, and to allow
these groups to speak and emphaize their own perspectives: to
decolonoze design. To make design more community-based instead of being
dominated by the monoculture of european and American thinking. (Of which I
stand guilty.)

What are their suggestions? The very issues Meredith talked about.

To broaden the education, to include more about the world, about business,
psychology, the environment, STEM topics, etc. To make sure people learn to
work in multidisciplinary teams as collaborative equals -- the other
disciplines being from outside of design, especially engineering, social
sciences, business people, and yes, politicians.   The need to decolonize
design, to stop being so arrogant.  Designers love to go into communities
and determine the problems, then return with the solutions: The traditional
way that the nations of Europe and the United States has imposed their ways
of thinking and behaving upon the rest of the world (including the
indigenous citizens in their own countries). There was a strong cry for
community-driven design, a co-design that comes from the people, for the
people.

Many talked about the discrimination they themselves faced because of their
gender or race.

Get rid of the distinctions among many of the design specialties, said many
people: they no longer apply and worse, they ;read to internal siloes.  The
different specialties of design are real and essential, but they should be
worked in concert, not as is today often the case, either in isolation or
in competition with one another.

The essays voice the need to work with (and learn about) other disciplines,
to get a better understanding of business, to work together with the
creative people within communities. The need to emphasize ethics and
values, not as a single course, but as a part of all courses, so that
students would recognize the importance in all the work that they do.

Many complaints about courses that do not address the needs of the
workplace (especially true in Latin America).

There were very people cited in these essays: one of the most frequent
names was that of Arturo Escobar, an anthropologist who, until his
retirement, taught at the University of North Carolina in the eastern
United States. (He now is establishing schools in his native Colombia.)
Arturo has written numerous books, but the one that has resonated most for
those writing is "Designs for the Plurivese." Note that the word "design"
is plural: we have many different world views, beliefs, and points of view
in this world so one design will not work. We need a variety of designs.
If you haven't read the book, I recommend it. If you haven't heard of
Escobar, I recommend his interview "Farewell to Development":

The interview

Arturo Escobar, "Farewell to Development," interview by Allen White, Great
Transition Initiative (February 2018),
http://greattransition.org/publication/farewell-to-development.

The book

Escobar, A. (2018). *Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence,
autonomy, and the making of worlds*. Duke University Press.

I suspect the majority of designers and student know about the need for
sustainability of the environment and the issues surround climate change
(and the unfortunate role that design plays in these issues). But how many
understand the drive for decoliniation of design? How many design students
read Escobar -- or the many others who write about these issues?

What Meredith is championing is to transform Design into a respected
discipline within academia, a discipline of doing. making, and
transforming. One with a rich body of knowledge, a deep understanding of
the issues in the world, and graduates who can attack them.

And now to add my own goal:  A discipline that is respected as an equal in
the powerful halls of academia. It should not be thought of as part of
STEM, or social and behavioral sciences, or art, or humanities because
Design cuts across all disciplines. Basic design skills of addresing the
appoprirtta problems, systems thinking, witha focus upon people and
societies (as opposed to efficiency or productivity) and the power of small
inc remental implementations, with tests and continual revision: learning
from each cycle.

Design should be in its own school with the same status and prestige of
existing schools: integrated into the university as a powerful force for
good. And rewarded not for the papers that are published, but for the good
works that result. Medicine is about saving lives, public health about
preventing disease and ill health: Design is about transforming the world
for good: sustainable, community-driven, empowering the variety of beliefs
and cultures to build on their rich history and talents, the better for
everyone. Design also needs a solid, substantial base of deep academic
content as the infrastructure for its existence -- and without this, it
will not be accepted as an equal in academia. (This base of knowledge has a
long history and in recent years has been increasing, along with the
development of new, high-quality journals that supplement the existing ones
such as Design Studies and Design Issues -- which will still remain as
required reading for scholars.

Is there anything new in that? No. I'm simply channeling Victor Papenak.
Designers need to take responsibility for the state of the world: for
eliminating the monoculture, for supporting different approaches, and for
refusing to contribute to the degradation of the environment and of human
values. But Papenak's criticism of designers was misdirected. Designers are
seldom in a position of power where they can control the activities of the
large, loabl companies they work for. So yes, designers need to have a
strong ethical responsibility to help make the world d a better place and
not to design things that destroy the environment in getting the basic
materials, in manufacturing, in usage, and in disposal, but they can only
have an impact of more designer s are at the highest levels of a company --
in the United States, this means the "C-Suite" where the Cheif Executive
Officer (CEO) resides -- we need more Chief Design Officers (CDOs), more
designers who are General Managers, Managing Directors, etc.

Papenak's famous paragraph -- the very first paragraph of his book, for the
few readers who do not know it; I recommending replacing the phrase
"industrial design" with "design." When Papenak wrote the book, Industrial
design was the major culprit. Today, the blame extends across almost all
areas.


There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very
few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising
design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they
don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the
phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the
tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before
in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric
hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for
bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets
to millions of people. Before (in the "good old days"), if a person liked
killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else
study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a
mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill
or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating
whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by
choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers
have become a dangerous breed. And, the skills needed in these activities
are carefully taught to young people.

Papanek, V. J. (1971, 1984). Design for the real world: human ecology and
social change (First edition, 1971: This is the 2nd, completely rev. ed.).
Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.


It is time to move from voicing opinions to changing how we educate and how
we work. To move from trom thinking to doing.

Don


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