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Hi Gunnar, Good message. Thanks. It's easy to forget the role, significance and effectiveness of design researchers. Perhaps the most important role of design researchers is to get rid of designers. That is, to make irrelevant the current skills of designers - and enable designers to move on to something else. Design researchers have been spectacularly successful in doing this. Specifically, they have massively increased the amount and quality of designers' output. Most of this has been done by continually making designers' skills redundant through automation. Firms such as Adobe and AutoCAD have relied on design research to enable this. You would expect design disciplines to change... and design education. Design education seems to take around 10 years to respond to change. Design researchers have been causing the changes for over 50 years now - something should start to change soon (particularly a move away from Art traditions..). Best wishes, Terry ____________________ Dr. Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM Director Design-focused Research Group, Design Out Crime Research Centre Researcher, Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute Associate, Planning and Transport Research Centre Curtin University, PO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845 Mob: 0434 975 848, Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629, [log in to unmask] Member of International Scientific Council UNIDCOM/ IADE, Lisbon, Portugal Honorary Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK ____________________ -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gunnar Swanson Sent: Thursday, 10 March 2011 7:27 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: innovative curriculum design: getting rid of the old vocational silos Let me play Devil's Advocate for a moment. (Okay. Maybe I'm not playing.) First, I'm a big believer in broad education generally--see http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/GDasLiberalArt.pdf--and for designers. I'm also a believer that one of the giant problems in vocational training is that vocations are moving targets. Additionally, many designers traditionally work across "traditional" boundaries. And there's a whole pile of problems with assuming that students are going to spend their lives doing exactly what they are being taught. That said, I've seen some design-without-silos programs that don't seem to prepare students for anything. As important as transdisciplinarity is (generally and for designers), disciplinarity help a lot in maintaining standards. As I said, I've seen sans-silo programs that don't prepare students to be designers. What I have not seen is a design program that doesn't imply that it is preparing their students to be designers. Most plainly make the claim that they are. There's no imperative that higher education be vocational but I believe that there is an imperative that we be honest about what we do. Staying in traditional silos (something that I am not advocating) leads to the danger that students are not prepared for the future of design but it doesn't follow that escaping the silos will prepare them for either the future or the present. Gunnar ---------- Gunnar Swanson Design Office 1901 East 6th Street Greenville NC 27858 USA [log in to unmask] +1 252 258 7006 http://www.gunnarswanson.com