Warning: Very long post.
Here is the
text of my article, "Why Design Education Must Change". It will some
day be available on core77.com. Meanwhile, Ken Friedman ha asked me
to post it. So blame Ken.
Don Norman (today in Taipei)
Nielsen Norman Group
KAIST (Daejeon, S. Korea)
[log in to unmask] www.jnd.org
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/
===============
WHY DESIGN EDUCATION MUST CHANGE
Don Norman
(Column written for Core77.com)
November, 2010
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PREAMBLE:
Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up for in
craft skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing or
rendering, designers take an inordinate amount of pride in honing key
techniques over many years. Unfortunately many of these very skills
have limited use in the new design domains. (Core 77 columnist Kevin
McCullagh (www.core77.com/blog/columns/is_it_time_to_rethink_the_t-shaped_designer_17426.asp))
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I am forced to read a lot of crap. As a reviewer of submissions to
design journals and conferences, as a juror of design contests, and as
a mentor and advisor to design students and faculty, I read outrageous
claims made by designers who have little understanding of the
complexity of the problems they are attempting to solve or of the
standards of evidence required to make claims. Oftentimes the crap
comes from brilliant and talented people, with good ideas and
wonderful instantiations of physical products, concepts, or
simulations. The crap is in the claims.
In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused
upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on
organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service,
and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and
political issues. As a result, designers have become applied
behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the
task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues
and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes
can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions
are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes
can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be
educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite
understanding. Design schools do not train students about these
complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and
social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and
business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific
method, and experimental design.
Related problems occur with designers trained in engineering, for
although they may understand hard-core science, they are often
ignorant of the so-called soft areas of social and behavioral
sciences. The do not understand human behavior, chiding people for not
using technology properly, asking how they could be so illogical. (You
may have all heard the refrain: "if only we didn't have people, our
stuff would work just fine," forgetting that the point of the work was
to help people.) Engineers are often ignorant of how people actually
behave. And both engineers and designers are often ignorant of the
biases that can be unwittingly introduced into experimental designs
and the dangers of inappropriate generalization.
The social and behavioral sciences have their own problems, for they
generally are disdainful of applied, practical work and their
experimental methods are inappropriate: scientists seek “truth”
whereas practitioners seek "good enough." Scientists look for small
differences, whereas designers want large impact. People in
human-computer interaction, cognitive engineering, and human factors
or ergonomics are usually ignorant of design. All disciplines have
their problems: everyone can share the blame.
Time to change design education
Where once industrial designers focused primarily upon form and
function, materials and manufacturing, today's issues are far more
complex and challenging. New skills are required, especially for such
areas as interaction, experience, and service design. Classical
industrial design is a form of applied art, requiring deep knowledge
of forms and materials and skills in sketching, drawing, and
rendering. The new areas are more like applied social and behavioral
sciences and require understanding of human cognition and emotion,
sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge of the scientific
method, statistics and experimental design so that designers can
perform valid, legitimate tests of their ideas before deploying them.
Designers need to deploy microprocessors and displays, actuators and
sensors. Communication modules are being added to more and more
products, from the toaster to the wall switch, the toilet and books
(now called e-books). Knowledge of security and privacy, social
networks, and human interaction are critical. The old skills of
drawing and sketching, forming and molding must be supplemented and in
many cases, replaced, by skills in programming, interaction, and human
cognition. Rapid prototyping and user testing are required, which also
means some knowledge of the social and behavior sciences, of
statistics, and of experimental design.
In educational institutions, industrial design is usually housed in
schools of art or architecture, usually taught as a practice with the
terminal degree being a BA, MA, or MFA. It is rare for in design
education to have course requirements in science, mathematics,
technology, or the social sciences. As a result the skills of the
designer are not well suited for modern times.
The Uninformed Are Training the Uninformed
My experience with some of the world's best design schools in Europe,
the United States, and Asia indicate that the students are not well
prepared in the behavioral sciences that are so essential for fields
such as interaction and experience design. They do not understand
experimental rigor or the potential biases that show up when the
designer evaluates their own products or even their own experimental
results. Their professors also lack this understanding.
Designers often test their own designs, but with little understanding
of statistics and behavioral variability. They do not know about
unconscious biases that can cause them to see what they wish to see
rather than what actually has occurred. Many are completely unaware of
the necessity of control groups. The social and behavioral sciences
(and medicine) long ago learned the importance of blind scoring where
the person scoring the results does not know what condition is being
observed, nor what is being tested.
The problem is compounded by a new insistence by top research
universities that all design faculty have a PhD degree. But given the
limited training of most design faculty, there is very little
understanding of the kind of knowledge that constitutes a PhD. The
uninformed are training the uninformed.
There are many reasons for these difficulties. I've already discussed
the fact that most design is taught in schools of art or architecture.
Many students take design because they dislike science, engineering,
and mathematics. Unfortunately, the new demands upon designers do not
allow us the luxury of such non-technical, non science-oriented
training.
A different problem is that even were a design school to decide to
teach more formal methods, we don't really have a curriculum that is
appropriate for designers. Take my concern about the lack of
experimental rigor. Suppose you were to agree with me – what courses
would we teach? We don't really know. The experimental methods of the
social and behavioral sciences are not well suited for the issues
faced by designers.
Designers are practitioners, which means they are not trying to extend
the knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge. The
designer's goal is to have large, important impact. Scientists are
interested in truth, often in the distinction between the predictions
of two differing theories. The differences they look for are quite
small: often statistically significant but in terms of applied impact,
quite unimportant. Experiments that carefully control for numerous
possible biases and that use large numbers of experimental observers
are inappropriate for designers.
The designer needs results immediately, in hours or at possibly a few
days. Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient. Yes,
attention must be paid to the possible biases (such as experimenter
biases and the impact of order of presentation of tests), but if one
is looking for large effect, it should be possible to do tests that
are simpler and faster than are used by the scientific community will
suffice. Designs don't have to be optimal or perfect: results that are
not quite optimum or les than perfect are often completely
satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is perfect, nor
need they be. We need experimental techniques that recognize these
pragmatic, applied goals.
Design needs to develop its own experimental methods. They should be
simple and quick, looking for large phenomena and conditions that are
"good enough." But they must still be sensitive to statistical
variability and experimental biases. These methods do not exist: we
need some sympathetic statisticians to work with designers to develop
these new, appropriate methods.
When Designers Think They Know, But Don't
Designers fall prey to the two ailments of not knowing what they don't
know and, worse, thinking they know things they don't. This last
condition is especially true when it comes to human behavior: the
cognitive sciences. Designers (and engineers) think that they
understand human behavior: after all, they are human and they have
observed people all their lives. Alas, they believe a "naive
psychology": plausible explanations of behavior that have little or no
basis in fact. They confuse the way they would prefer people to behave
with how people actually behave. They are unaware of the large
experimental and theoretical literature, and they are not well versed
in statistical variability.
Real human behavior is very contextual. It is readily biased by
multiple factors. Human behavior is driven by both emotional and
cognitive processes, much of which is subconscious and not accessible
to human conscious knowledge. Gaps and lapses in attention are to be
expected. Human memory is subject to numerous biases and errors.
Different memory systems have different characteristics. Most
importantly, human memory is not a calling up of images of the past
but rather a reconstruction of the remembered event. As a result, it
often fits expectations more closely than it fits reality and it is
easily modified by extraneous information.
Many designers are woefully ignorant of the deep complexity of social
and organizational problems. I have seen designers propose simple
solutions to complex problems in education, poverty, crime, and the
environment. Sometimes these suggestions win design prizes (the
uniformed judge the uninformed.) Complex problems are complex systems:
there is no simple solution. It is not enough to mean well: one must
also have knowledge.
The same problems arise in doing experimental studies of new methods
of interaction, new designs, or new experiences and services. When
scientists (and designers) study people, they too are subject to these
same human biases, and so cognitive scientists carefully design
experiments so that the biases of the experimenter can have no impact
on the results or their interpretation. All these factors are well
understood by cognitive scientists, but seldom known or understood by
designers and engineers. Here is a case of not knowing what is not
known.
Why Designers Must Know Some Science
Over the years, the scientific method evolved to create order and
evaluation to otherwise exaggerated claims. Science is not a body of
facts, not the use of mathematics. Rather, the key to science is its
procedures, or what is called the scientific method. The method does
not involve white robes and complex mathematics. The scientific method
requires public disclosure of the problem, the method of approach, the
findings, and then the interpretation. This allows others to repeat
the finding: replication is essential. Nothing is accepted in science
until others have been able to repeat the work and come to the same
conclusion. Moreover, scientists have learned to their dismay that
conclusions are readily biased by prior belief, so experimental
methods have been devised to minimize these unintentional biases.
Science is difficult when applied to the physical and biological
world. But when applied to people, the domain of the social sciences,
it is especially difficult. Now subtle biases abound, so careful
statistical procedures have been devised to minimize them. Moreover,
scientists have learned not to trust themselves, so in the social
sciences it is sometimes critical to design tests so that neither the
person being studied nor the person doing the study know what
condition is involved – this is called "double blind."
Designers, on the whole, are quite ignorant of all this science stuff.
They like to examine a problem, devise what seems to be a solution,
and then announce the result for all to acclaim. Contests are held.
Prizes are awarded. But wait-- has anyone examined the claims? Tested
them to see if they perform as claimed? Tested them against
alternatives (what science calls control groups), tested them often
enough to minimize the impact of statistical variability? Huh? say the
designers: Why, it is obvious – just look - What is all this
statistical crap?
Journals do not help, for most designers are practitioners and seldom
publish. And when they do, I find that the reviewers in many of our
design journals and conferences are themselves ignorant of appropriate
experimental procedures and controls, so even the published work is
often of low quality. Design conferences are particularly bad: I have
yet to find a design conference where the rigor of the peer review
process is satisfactory. The only exceptions are those run by
societies from the engineering and sciences, such as the
Computer-Human Interaction and graphics conferences run by the
Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers or the Computer
Science society (IEEE, ACM and the CHI and SIGGRAPH conferences).
These conferences, however, favor the researcher, so although they are
favorite publication vehicles for design researchers and workers in
interaction design, practitioners often find their papers rejected.
The practice of design lacks a high quality venue for its efforts.
Design Education Must Change
Service design, interaction design, and experience design are not
about the design of physical objects: they require minimal skills in
sketching, knowledge of materials, or manufacturing. In their place,
they require knowledge of the social sciences, of story construction,
of back-stage operations, and of interaction. We still need
classically trained industrial designers: the need for styling, for
forms, for the intelligent use of materials will never go away.
In today's world of ubiquitous sensors, controllers, motors, and
displays, where the emphasis is on interaction, experience, and
service, where designers work on organizational structure and services
as much as on physical products, we need a new breed of designers.
This new breed must know about science and technology, about people
and society, about appropriate methods of validation of concepts and
proposals. They must incorporate knowledge of political issues and
business methods, operations, and marketing. Design education has to
move away from schools of art and architecture and move into the
schools of science and engineering. We need new kinds of designers,
people who can work across disciplines, who understand human beings,
business, and technology and the appropriate means of validating
claims.
Today's designers are poorly trained to meet the today's demands: We
need a new form of design education, one with more rigor, more
science, and more attention to the social and behavioral sciences, to
modern technology, and to business. But we cannot copy the existing
courses from those disciplines: we need to establish new ones that are
appropriate to the unique requirements of the applied requirements of
design. It is time for a change. We, the design community, must lead
this change.
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