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Dear Gunnar, Thanks for the post. I agree with you that design education should not be just about adequately training students to 'fit' into the industry, or to merely meed what the industry need at this moment, especially if it's a technical driven industry. I see that design education needs to train graduates to push the boundaries of the industry and to contribute by exploring areas that are not yet being made explicit. My thought is that there are two levels of (graphic) design industry (this is based on my observation and working experience in Malaysia and Western Australia): The first level is where designers function only at the technical level, eg: operating CS4, etc. Here designers are seen as technicians, and the only reason clients come to designers is for their computer, illustration, or photography skills. There's no critical thinking involved. Any 15 years-old who knows how to push a mouse, and got a (pirated) copy of CS4 would start calling themselves 'designers'. So for educated designers who have been through expensive 3-4 years of university, is it worth it to 'compete' with these 'designers' at this technical level? However, there's another level of design industry, in which designers function as consultants rather than technicians. Design Thinking is key at this level. Also, 'design outcome' here is not limited to just artifacts. Designers can be involved in solving managerial problems creatively, designing a creative business, help make an organisation clear to all workers, etc. Yes, to be able to function at this level, a mutual understanding among the society of what Design really is will be very important. But this is where KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING in Design comes in very critically. One thing i am trying to understand is that why developing countries still see design as a 'western' thing that is being introduced. The thing is, there are alot of good design examples in a nation's own history and culture that can be improved and built-on, eg: traditional houses, ways traditional communities function, etc. These are all design processes that we can all learn from. So yes, i see that we need to push design gradautes to look at the second level. Sorry if my words are a little direct, but i think design education at a university level have to teach students to function in both levels of design industry. -chris --- Dr Christopher Kueh Curtin University of Technology > Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:00:25 -0400 > From: [log in to unmask] > Subject: scientific jetsam and design thinking > To: [log in to unmask] > > Since graphic design is a bit of a cargo cult, I've been trying to find useful flotsam in Terry's notion of the scientific future of a scientific future where machines do the designing and, of course, there are some large crates that are well worth opening. While others search for beetles, I think it's worth pointing out a couple of things before we turn too much of it into a bonfire on the beach. > > Some of Terry's description of design can be justified by noting what might be called extreme affordances. Most users of graphic design software never adjust default settings so many "decisions" are never consciously made by "designers." To this extent, the software is doing much of what designers think of as designing. > > One doesn't have to argue about consciousness or agency or such to note that much of the work done by graphic designers and by those employed by graphic designers a few years ago is now done by software and that much of what was called wisdom or taste or judgment is now called "the default setting." We can also guess that this trend will continue. > > One good example is the spacing of letters. That used to be a matter of looking closely and spending the time to make careful choices. Until the conversion to small computers, most graphic designers left most of that to their typesetters but Herb Lubalin famously sliced away at the most expertly set headlines. Now InDesign does a better job of making those "subjective" decisions than do the vast majority of graphic designers. > > I have argued on Typo-L that most of the judgments we call "standard typography" (i.e., the skillful setting of large amounts of type for continuous reading) is rule based even if there is no agreement on the rules. Any set of rules can be made into software so the typographer's craft will be automated. This argument is not as obviously true of other aspects of graphic design or of typographic design as we move farther away from book typography but it is clearly true that most activities--from writing to cooking--include making the same decision repeatedly and any such decision can be automated. > > If we assume that the demand for graphic design services (kind and quantity) were stable, Terry's description of a few developers of software and knowledge for software, plus many machine-tending drones would be more compelling. The nature of the "deliverables" for graphic designers has changed enough in my career to belie the implicit notion of stability. (Of course Terry could argue that the software designers change faster than the graphic designers so stability is not required.) > > Terry's description of design and the future of design education got me thinking about how (and/or if) it applied to graphic design education as I see it (and as I might project its future.) If the purpose of graphic design education is to train people as computer operators and if computer software will be doing more and more of a non-expanding task (and if the software will become easier and easier to use) then the only conclusion would be that the task of graphic design education is shrinking. > > If the task of graphic design education is to train computer operators, one would also wonder why this is a university major. If the software tending is ever-and-ever easier, it seems that graphic design would be (and should be) marginalized in the university more and more. > > It is possible that Terry is right and that this realization drives much of the resistance to design research and design becoming scientific. If we define graphic design in the narrowest sense and assume that the role of design education is to minimally prepare people for the minimal description of the job, this seems to make a bit of depressing sense. > > As my previous post showed, I don't buy Terry's description of the task of graphic design. (It has little to do with what I did for a living for most of my adult life and is a much narrower job than mine.) > > Although I don't object to the broader views of design as possible models for education (some of you are familiar with my 1994 Design Issues article on one such approach http://www.gunnarswanson.com/old/writingPages/GDasLibArt.html), it's not the basis of any design education I'm familiar with. There are some programs that claim to teach "design thinking" as a separate activity from design as I think about it. (Some of how I think about design as an activity is evident in a slide lecture in the form of a Flash movie I did about a year ago. It's at http://www.gunnarswanson.com/definedesign and requires a chunk of downloading, sound on, and a screen bigger than my smallest laptop.) > > Roger Martin, dean of Rotman School of Business says design thinking is, instead of choosing from existing models, the ability to develop new models. Several people on this list say that design is pretty much any effort to change the present reality. > > Most design education is almost necessarily narrower. The student population comes expecting to learn how to function as designers. (Certainly many of them have expectations of that in line with Terry's machine tenders.) > > My experience is that the activity of designing combined with analysis of the activity and the designed objects that are the result prepares students to do the sort of thinking that Martin describes better than most university majors do. I don't have any direct experience with the teaching and/or learning of design thinking divorced from design doing. I would love to hear anything that anyone has to say about "design thinking" programs. > > Gunnar > ---------- > Gunnar Swanson Design Office > 1901 East 6th Street > Greenville, North Carolina 27858 > > [log in to unmask] > +1 252 258 7006 > > at East Carolina University: > +1 252 328 2839 > [log in to unmask] _________________________________________________________________ See all the ways you can stay connected to friends and family http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/default.aspx