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Dear All

I think this is a very interesting thread, and it reminds me of the thread
about 'research' and 'Research' that was running a year or so ago.

At present I am trying to write an article for Iridescent (the Icograda
online journal) that grapples with these issues from a graphic design
perspective. I have recently successfully completed my own full time, AHRC
funded PhD, having achieved a first at undergraduate level and a distinction
at Masters level and taught in HE for 15 years. So, in theory you would
think I was well prepared to step up to PhD. In reality I found a huge gap
in my knowledge, in particular in relation to the traditions and academic
discourse of research. I took part in the training programme offered by my
University, which focussed primarily on practical research (more information
gathering and management) skills for first years, then academic writing and
viva/presentation skills for years two to five. Alongside these there were a
range of very interesting and sometimes useful seminars from guest lecturers
that focused on their own research. But I can't help feeling if the training
programme had begun with an introduction to research design and an
introduction to a range of qualitative approaches, I may have not only been
able to position the work of the lecturers more clearly within the wider
academy, but also my own. I feel this lack of introduction—which in many
fields outside of graphic design comes at undergraduate level—leaves graphic
design students on the back foot when it comes to starting doctoral
research. I too would not suggest that graphic designers become social
scientists, but personally I feel my own research and practice has benefited
hugely from engaging with disciplines external to design. Such crossing of
disciplinary borders would also help prepare students for multi-disciplinary
work where they have to contend with colleagues who come from quite
different backgrounds with different approaches. I think there's much to be
gained by crossing borders rather than trying to erect disciplinary fences.
Seeing what we are not, can also help define what we are, or what we can be.
I hope to start introducing such references into my own teaching as I return
to a position in HE. Especially as the graphic design students I have worked
with often engage with ethnographic methods or content analysis (albeit in
simplistic terms perhaps) but they just think, as Keith Russell said on the
list in 2010, that they are simply solving the brief set for them—they are
unaware they are using research methods.

Best,
Alison

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Birger Sevaldson <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Sinse Derek mentiones the Oslo School:
> Here we are stuck in a way of teaching the two years of master level in an
> old fashioned way that has not cought up with what happens on our PhD level
> and in our nummerous research projects. There is a gap we need to bridge. It
> is not the design activities and various practices, even traditional ones,
> that are the problem. The problem is, we do not have any research training
> for the master students in addition and in interaction with the
> skills-building activities and design practices. This becomes a problem when
> master students are engaged in very complex tasks that are intentionally in
> the forefront of the design realm e.g. the design for disarmement projects
> Derek and I teach together here.
> I do not think that replacing design skills with e.g. social sciences is a
> good idea. Designers must not become social scientists. The value of design
> research is found in the middle ground between design practice and knowledge
> production. Design brings something new to research. (We have become very
> recognized for this at the Norwegian Research Council). It is also not a
> solution to import research practices from other fields e.g. social sciences
> without a criticallity that is possitioned in design so to reshape research
> to become proprietary for design.
> Many of us have been working along this line of balancing the "import" of
> research methods, theories and practices with refining design practice as
> knowledge production. Unfortunately in many places we still need to fight
> for a shift of the design education where we are embedded and the disharmony
> between what some of us teach, and the surrounding systems and structures
> remain.
> Meanwhile we continue to throw imensly complex challenges at our students
> for which they are not prepaired. The strange thing is that they love it,
> and they feel that design can be relevant and important. So the students are
> ready, we need to catch up.
>
> best
>
> Birger Sevaldson
>
>
> ________________________________________
> Fra: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
> research in Design [[log in to unmask]] p&#229; vegne av Derek B.
> Miller [[log in to unmask]]
> Sendt: 6. oktober 2011 10:54
> Til: [log in to unmask]
> Emne: Re: Design Education: Brilliance without Substance
>
> A brief interjection on the design education thread:
>
> I'm currently guest lecturer at AHO — the Oslo School of Architecture and
> Design — and through that experience I have started to get my thoughts in
> order. I'll stay far away from the artillery shells of the senior design
> specialists here as I am thoroughly out of my depth in addressing Design
> Education writ large. I'll say only this, and from my perspective as
> Director at The Policy Lab:
>
> 1. There may be some value in aligning educational conduct (i.e. what we
> teach and how) with actual evolving design practice.
>
> 2. That means, as designers (at least some designers) are pushing the
> boundaries of design practice into new areas (or are helping shape and
> re-conceptualize familiar areas), it seems pretty clear to me that they
> nevertheless lack some of the needed intellectual skills required to
> properly engage those new practices from a degree of professionalism.
>
> 3. Mapping those gaps between the "know-how" and the "need-to-know" seems
> less a theoretical task than a pragmatic one to keep education both current
> and innovative.
>
> 4. My immediate concern is that students are not really being prepared for
> the work they think they are going into, and more to the point, they don't
> know they aren't prepared because their education is so distant from the
> social sciences and other fields necessary to illuminate their own gaps.
>
> As The Policy Lab is now cooperating with numerous design firms and schools
> in order to design new services, I can experience first-hand their skill
> sets in tasks such as interviewing, structuring research, differentiating
> research questions from interview questions, and rendering interpretations
> on findings. Among other things.
>
> Just like undergraduates entering a first-year class on qualitative
> research methods, these students are totally unprepared for serious
> research.This is only one slice of the larger pie you are all discussing, to
> be sure. This would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that design
> schools are not establishing in their students the foundational intellectual
> skills needed to conduct the work they then assign to the students.
>
> At The Policy Lab, we are increasingly convinced that the design juncture
> is the key nexus for attention in crafting policy and programming.
>
> There is a brave new world to be discovered in separating "designing" from
> "decision making" in democratic processes in recognizing that design puts
> options on the table, while decision making removes them from the table.
> That small, conceptual shift (of both inserting design, and distinguishing
> design) could fundamentally alter how we approach major public challenges
> (almost all of which fall under the common design rubric of "wicked
> problems").
>
> The challenge may be design. The question is whether designers will be the
> ones to contribute to that challenge. As of this very moment, I'm not so
> sure.
>
> Derek.
> _________________
> Dr. Derek B. Miller
> Director
>
> The Policy Lab
> 321 Columbus Ave.
> Seventh Floor of the Electric Carriage House
> Boston, MA 02116
> United States of America
>
> Phone
> +1 617 440 4409
> Twitter
> @Policylabtweets
> Web
> www.thepolicylab.org
>
> This e-mail includes proprietary and confidential information belonging to
> The Policy Lab, Ltd. All rights reserved.
>
> On Oct 5, 2011, at 3:19 AM, Andrew J King wrote:
>
> > Don Norman's abstract of his article for Core77 on design education seems
> to echo exactly the thesis of an article I read in the old UK Chartered
> Society of Designers journal, probably in the mid 80's.
> >
> > Being currently on the other side of the planet, I don't have access to
> my paper archives, so I can't offer a reference. The article was mainly
> concerned with furniture design rather than product, but the general gist
> was similar: design education remains too much based in craft and craft
> skill, and not enough in education for industrial design. That this should
> still be an issue is profoundly worrying, but I think it goes much deeper:
> Since the collapse of the Modernist consensus, undergraduate design
> education seems to be mired in a crisis of theory: What to teach and how?
> This would be a happy and creative opportunity were it not that, too often,
> it seems to be an unrecognised crisis, or at least, one unrecognised by
> those who ought to be doing something about it. That it has been going on
> for so long, is a tragedy, and I sometimes feel we are in danger of 'losing
> design' altogether, in the sense of losing all recognition of it, in the
> specialisms of the academy and in public perception, as an integrative
> discipline, and not a mere collection of assorted industrial crafts.
> >
> > With new technologies of manufacturing beginning to mount an assault on
> the last bastions of skill, it seems to be ever more urgent that design
> education re-invents itself and shows that it is something bigger and more
> important than the ever more fragmented specialisms that seem to be popular
> in many colleges.
> >
> > Andrew J King
> >
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > On 5 Oct 2011, at 09:16, Don Norman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> For your amusement (or perhaps annoyance).  My latest essay on design
> >> education on the core77.com website:
> >>
> >> Design Education: Brilliance without Substance
> >>
> http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/design_education_brilliance_without_substance_20364.asp
> >>
> >> We are now in the 21st century, but design curricula seem stuck in the
> mid
> >> 20th century, except for the addition of computer tools . . .




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* * *

Dr. Alison Barnes

School of Graphic Design, LCC
University of the Arts, London

www.alisonbarnesonlineportfolio.tumblr.com
http://informationenvironments.academia.edu/AlisonBarnes/About
http://geo-graphic.blogspot.com/