Dear Eduardo,
Many thanks for the history lesson. It's great and useful. I hadn't come
across any of it.
You make a good point about design education being more faithful to its
original project.
Warm regards,
Terry

-----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 Eduardo
Corte Real
Sent: Saturday, 14 May 2011 12:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: IDEO design thinking

Dear Friends,

First, I must say that I agree with Don when he says that design
education must change. As I use to say here, at my school: What people
used to call stability is now called Change. And what I must also say is
that design education changed a lot since the foundation of the
Government School of Design in London and the National Academy of Design
in New York in the 1830's. Please notice the eight -- not nine. Both
institutions wanted exactly to withdraw 'Design' from the mere craft
activity. The intellectual tools were Drawing (including all the
geometrical complexities available at the time) and History -- mainly as
a way of understanding the value of Beauty, and other forms of inquiry
on the same subject as you shall see in this post.

In both cases - NY and LON -, the institutions were funded to react upon
the instituted Academies of Art, respectively: American Academy of Fine
Arts and the Royal Academy of Arts, because they were failing to
introduce ethical -- such as utility and general good - concerns in
their production.

It is a funny thing that in short years to come the Arts & Crafts
movement (today considered the birth of modern design) advocated a
return to craft.

After a quick probe in William Morris's writings I don't think he ever
uses the word design or designers referring to what he is or what he
does or his movement. Christopher Dresser, however, was a designer.
First because he attended the Government School of Design, second
because he later was lecturer there, and mostly because he produced
several items for the industry of the time helping also to reshape it. I
think Dresser is the first person that we can truly call a Designer. His
interest in the fundamentals of his production led him to follow such an
interest in Botany that, after several papers published on the subject;
he was awarded with a honorary doctorate by the University of Jena.

What I'm trying to say is that "the designer" as a social and
professional project was something of a high intellectual level, not a
dumb "craft person". Dresser's interest in the science of botany is a
clearly on the line with applied science to everyday life objects that
Don Norman speaks about so brilliantly in his latest book.

Technology (what problematic word this is) is so overwhelming present in
the fabric of existing objects and objects to come as probably
Vegetalogy was to the "new art".

I don't know where the idea that design education is craft education
came. Drawing a perfect logarithmic spiral is a craft? Is it knowing
about Colour theories a craft? Is drawing an acoustic graph in an
interior design a craft? Is it reading Merleau-Ponty or Kant a craft? Is
it reading Lawrence Durrel a craft? (Sometimes I force my students into
"Tunc").

Maybe, instead, of saying that design education must change, we should
say that design education should be more faithful to its initial
project. Projecting things, designing things is an intellectual activity
-- that can even be taught as if it was a craft -- that prepare things
to be in the world both as useful as beautiful, mostly, as beautifully
useful.

In this sense, obviously, heating a room is not Design. The design (the
other meaning of design) of heating a room can conduct to Design
something to heat the room.

And by the way, if Design Thinking is unable to predict the effects of
design in complex situations because we as humans are unable to do so
why is design thinking here in the first place and not simply thinking?
And... are there any simple situations?

Best regards from sunny Lisbon,

Eduardo