Dear Nigel,
Golly. This seems a bit grumpy, especially with all those exclamation points. You did not object to a comparable announcement from an EU group with a board from only one nation and team members mostly from the same one nation as the board. For that matter, you never had a comparable complaint about the board of the Design Research Society during all those years that 100% of the Council members were from the UK. If you recall, I was the first person ever elected to Council from outside the UK.
You are mistaken on one point. I am not American. I am a dual citizen of Sweden and Australia. While I was born in the US, I have lived elsewhere for decades.
Even so, I have no problem with people who do live in the US. Not all of them are Americans, either. Some people who live and work in the US were born in other nations. In a world of high job mobility for people with talent, universities and corporations recruit the best talent they can find. Those people then move to where the job is. And several members of our group are Canadians. When last I looked, they belong to the Commonwealth and — as it is for you and for me — Elizabeth II is our queen.
But citizenship it is not the point. The composition of the Steering Committee is something of an historical artefact. And nearly all of us have lived and worked in many nations. Excluding a scholar such as myself, most are practicing professional experts with vast international experience. We’ve done our best to get a serious balance of interests, experiences, and genders.
Even more important, each Working Group has at least two leaders, and these come from at least two continents. The work of the project is done in the working groups. We’re starting with the working groups that you see on the project web site. There will be more.
To develop the project and the groups, we circulated invitations and an appear for participation to many lists and communities. You were also invited, at least through the PhD-Design list and probably through other vehicles. We drew over 700 responses from around the world. I read every response when we hit 600 to begin thinking about leaders for the working groups.
There are indeed challenges and problems with design education. That’s global, and it isn’t a particular problem of the USA. Statistically, one can expect that any problem seen in higher education will be seen to a greater degree in the USA simply because the USA has more colleges and universities than any other nation does. Of course, one also sees more good examples for the same reason. 8 of the top 10 universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities are in the US. (ARWU is compiled at Shanghai Jiaotong University, so this is not an American opinion.) The Times Higher Education ranking shows 7 of the top in the US — so I guess your British countrymen agree. With around 4,500 accredited colleges and universities, the US has more of the best and more of the troubled. That’s everything, not just design.
I would have thought that the time came long ago for us to think of the field as a whole rather than picking on one another over such topics as where we come from or where we live and work.
The professional fields of medicine, engineering, and law have undertaken these kinds of studies. This is the first time that the design field has undertaken such a project using a large group of global experts with working groups that represent the full diversity of our field. Perhaps we could have found a more diverse steering committee in national terms — I cannot argue against that. But we have a rich, diverse steering committee in every other dimension.
Nigel, we worked hard to reach out widely across the field and around the world. Some of the people who are complaining about things we’ve missed are among those who did not respond to the invitations we sent.
The project has more than a year of work behind us, and probably two years of work ahead of us. I expect that we will miss some things and make some mistakes — and I hope our system of working groups, steering committee, and advisors will help us to catch mistakes and correct them to make a strong final report.
Yours,
Ken
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Nigel Cross wrote:
Hi Ken,
I was so very excited to learn that our friends from IBM have set up the new website!! And also to see the extensive number of so many other of our friends from the USA represented on the 'Future of Design Education' Steering Committee and Workgroup Leaders! I make it 24 USA-based people, 5 Canada-based, 5 Europe-based (plus you, but then you are also American!) and one other. And with so many of them being from industry!! It's good to know that we have so many friends who could help us!!
I'm just wondering: does this mean there really is a big problem with design education particularly in the USA?
Yours,
Nigel
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