Dear PHD-DESIGN list members:
As many others have already done, I would like to congratulate the members
of the UCI School of Design committee on what is truly an awe-inspiring
proposal, and thank them--and the organizers of and participants in this
conference--for having put so many difficult (and therefore interesting!)
issues on the table. As a result of reading the proposal and following the
thread of this conference, I spent two hours this morning talking to one of
my colleagues in communication design about our own school's curriculum, and
another hour this afternoon talking to our director about everything from
curriculum to the amount of startup money allocated for incoming junior
faculty in the UCI proposal ($117,000!) to the dollar-per-square-foot figure
used for budgeting for the UCI building ($275/ft^2). I think it is a
testament to the proposal's thoroughness and provocativeness that it could
spark such sustained conversations during what is a very busy time of year
for those of us in academia (at least in the U.S.).
Since I am supposed to introduce myself, I should note that I come to this
discussion from a somewhat different perspective than many of you; I was
trained as an art/architectural historian at Carleton College and then at UC
Berkeley, and am now an assistant professor of art history at Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale. However, my research centers on design
history rather than on the history of the fine arts, and the majority of my
teaching load is dedicated to design history and to critical
theory/research/writing instruction, rather than to what most people would
think of as "normal" art history. I work within a School of Art and Design
that houses undergraduate programs in industrial design and communication
design, as well as both undergraduate and graduate programs in the fine arts
and crafts. In the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller was a Distinguished University
Professor here; however, our current reputation as a School of Art and
Design is due largely to our graduate programs in the crafts (including the
only MFA program in blacksmithing in the U.S.).
I'm writing because I was intrigued by Keith Russell's response to Lorraine
Justice, and wanted to follow up on a couple of things he said, as well as
to make some other unrelated comments about the proposed UCI curriculum. As
we are currently gearing up at my institution to develop master's-level
programs in both design and art/design history, I read the UCI proposal with
great interest, and with an eye to whether we might wish to (or be able to)
implement some of its suggested directions here. I also read it as, in some
ways, an outsider to the field of design; I am not now, nor have I ever
been, a practicing designer, so I do not feel particularly well qualified to
comment on, say, the number of drawing courses that should be included in a
product design curriculum (though I have very much enjoyed seeing everyone
else debate that issue). However, I do have strong opinions about other
aspects of the curriculum--including the design studies and "breadth"
components--so I'll try to limit my comments to those. Following Lorraine
Justice's lead, here's a short summary of my points:
1. A response to (and request for clarification of) Keith Russell's fulcrum
analogy
2. A seconding of Keith Russell's comments on the design studies track
3. A query to the proposal's authors about the UCI curriculum's breadth
requirements and about the role of the liberal arts generally
4. A nuts-and-bolts query to the proposal's authors about 35mm slides vs.
digital image archives and about budgeting for staffing and facilities for
either/both
5. A question directed at anyone who cares to respond, about the place of
art history and design history in design curricula
*****
1. A response to (and request for clarification of) Keith Russell's fulcrum
analogy
Keith Russell notes in his response to Lorraine Justice's Session II
statement that "Design may well have its lever (economics - hence the China
example of 400 schools) and it may well have its load (making everything
different) but it lacks, at the level of an academic discipline, a fulcrum.
Getting lots of diverse people together does not constitute a fulcrum (more
like a rugby scrum)."
Keith, I'm not sure I fully understand the lever-fulcrum-load analogy. What
it sounds like you're saying is that although it is easy to justify design
*practice* (on the basis of economic, stylistic, social, and technological
benefits, among others), it is not easy to justify design's existence as an
*academic discipline* within the university setting. Is that what you intend
to say, or am I missing the point? If you could clarify, I'd appreciate it.
But if I did understand you correctly, where else would you propose that
design education occur, particularly if it is to be the sort of
interdisciplinary education that so many people seem to be calling for?
2. A seconding of Keith Russell's comments on the design studies track
In his response to Lorraine Justice, Keith Russell asked "Why do not ALL
parts of the program lead to MA and PhD? The closing of the model seems to
indicate a mixed agenda - we want integrated design but we don't want all
parts making equal claim on the direction of the program. If I were employed
to teach Design Issues in the degree - why can I not have PhD candidates? Is
this a failure of nerve, a pragmatic limitation, a restriction on types of
faculty members or simply an oversight?"
A couple of other people have brought up this issue during the
conference--as did some of people who wrote letters of support/evaluation
for the proposal (I am thinking particularly of Bill Dresselhaus's comments
on p. 144 in Appendix I)--and I must admit, the lack of anything beyond a BA
in design studies was a disappointment to me. I think Keith's comments and
questions about this issue are spot-on, so I would be interested to hear
more from the proposal's authors about how and why this decision was made.
3. A query to the proposal's authors about the UCI curriculum's breadth
requirements and about the role of the liberal arts generally
On p. 2 of the proposal, the authors spell out their assumptions about the
nature of contemporary demands on designers. They claim that designers "are
now called upon not only to produce new products but also to manage the
processes by which the products are produced and to understand more about
the ways products are used and the people who use them. In addition, more
than ever before, designers are required to have a global perspective on
their work and to investigate and articulate the methodology behind the
designs through systematic research, experimentation, intellectual inquiry,
and theoretical speculation. They are also expected to communicate their
findings and contribute to a body of knowledge that constitutes the basis
for an emerging academic discipline and a true science of design." This
statement is the basis for the authors' argument (also on p. 2) that
"Today's new designers require a new kind of training that goes beyond the
traditional apprenticeship and practice-based programs associated with most
academic design programs in the past."
Although I agree that the UCI proposal goes a long way toward providing the
"new kind of training" that contemporary designers need, I was surprised
that I did not once encounter the term "liberal arts" in the proposal (the
term "liberal undergraduate education" appears on p. 22, but that's the
closest thing I found). So I am wondering what kind of coursework UCI design
students will take that will help them develop "a global perspective on
their work." I am guessing--and hoping--that UCI requires foreign language
study, which is one very good way to learn about other cultures (and about
the nature of language and communication), and I assume that there must also
be some sort of "multicultural" requirement (at Carleton it was
called--rather charmingly, I think--the "Recognition and Affirmation of
Difference Requirement"). I noticed that there is a course in the UCI
curriculum that is called "Culture and Design"; perhaps this is a course
that deals with cultural difference? If so, whom do you envision teaching
this course? A design practitioner? A design studies person? A person from
another department entirely?
I guess my bigger worry here is that we are asking students to connect an
awful lot of dots, when in fact most of them do not actually have very many
dots *to* connect! I believe it's in those "breadth" courses, and in
electives in anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, history,
engineering, economics, management, etc. that students acquire "dots"
(bodies of knowledge, ways of thinking, methods of proceeding) that they can
then synthesize in the design studio. I say this not as a criticism of the
UCI proposal specifically; I think it's a problem in a lot of design
programs, including at my own institution (though we're working on that).
It's hard to know how to balance training in specific disciplinary
competencies with the liberal arts ideal.
4. A nuts-and-bolts query to the proposal's authors about 35mm slides vs.
digital image archives and about budgeting for staffing and facilities for
either/both
Okay. Here's the question that will make a lot of people's eyes roll,
because it's so typical that an art historian would ask it. But I think it's
a big issue that will have to be addressed at some point, because all of the
courses--but especially the design studies courses--are going to need slides
or digital images or some other as-yet-to-be-determined way of showing
pictures to large groups of people for instructional purposes. As I'm sure
most of you are aware, Kodak has announced that it will be discontinuing
production of slide projectors in a few years, so probably if I were
starting a new design school, I'd take a deep breath and take the plunge
into the world of digital images. But whether you have a traditional "slide
library" or an online digital image archive, someone is going to have to
gather all those images and photograph or scan them, unless you're confident
that Saskia or ArtStor is going to expand quickly enough to be useful (and
though ArtStor does have a design collection, it's small, and would not even
begin to suffice as a resource for teaching the history of design). Probably
the slide collection at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design would
be a good comparison in size and breadth for the kind of image bank you'd
need to support the kind of teaching you'll be doing at UCI, and I know
they've been digitizing as fast as they can. But it's a lot of work, and
requires (for slides, at least) a lot of space, and that's why I'm wondering
why I didn't see any staff or facilities budgeted for this kind of
instructional support. I've been working for over five years on expanding
our design slide collection--and I didn't have to start from scratch, and
I've had the benefit of a full-time slide librarian who has never balked
about the cost of the film and slide mounts and labor my requests have
entailed--and it's still not where I'd like it to be. I think it will be
hard to hire a good design historian--or support a design studies BA--unless
there is a fairly comprehensive image-bank of some sort in place at UCI from
the outset.
5. A question directed at anyone who cares to respond, about the place of
art history and design history in design curricula
Though maybe it should, it actually doesn't bother me that there's no
year-long art history survey required of the UCI design students. I have
been wondering whether it's actually something design students need at all,
and if they might be better off with a year-long design history survey
instead (this is an idea I'm toying with; I haven't thought through its
ramifications systematically yet, but if any of you have, I'd be interested
to hear what you think). Anyway, what *does* bother me about the UCI
curriculum is that there's only one quarter--i.e., less than a
semester!--allotted for design history, and given the different kinds of
design that will be taught at UCI, I can't even conceive of how one might ad
dress all those strands in ten weeks. I frankly think it's a stretch to
teach the history of industrial design, or the history of graphic design, in
one semester, much less in one quarter, and I'm wondering if that's just my
own bias (since it is my field, after all), or if others think that the
amount of design history included in the curriculum is too little, too much,
or just right. I also would be very interested to hear from practicing
designers about whether they think the art history and/or design history
courses they had were useful enough that they should continue to be
required.
Thanks again to everyone who has been involved in this conference; I've
really found it fascinating.
Carma R. Gorman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Art History
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
School of Art and Design, mail code 4301
Carbondale, IL 62901
United States of America
voicemail: 618-453-8634
fax: 618-453-7710
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