Dear Don,
When I read the article you point to in the New York Times, I found
myself wishing for some of the same problems.
If you consider some of the problems you’ve described in design
research, I’d argue that we don’t have too many researchers and
theorists with a solid PhD, but too few.
It’s clear we need people who can teach design skills and
professional wisdom. The case seems to be that too few design schools
teach the kinds of skills and wisdom students get on the job. It’s not
as though they have strong researchers with a PhD and too few strong
professional teachers, but rather that many design schools have studio
design teachers who have spent their lives in studio teaching without
strong professional experience and without developing strong research
skills either.
While I think you are too modest in speaking of yourself as a
researcher who only writes for other erudite professors, I am going to
take a contrarian view on this to say that our situation is not
comparable to that of law in all dimensions.
There are several hundred law journals, and these contribute to the
professional and to the body of law as well as carrying occasionally
rarified articles. In addition to this, there are hundreds of thousands
of volumes of case law, rulings, black-letter law, and commentaries.
There are only a couple dozen design journals, and we’re still
developing our literature.
Law schools date back to the formation of the European university in
the 900s. If you include the study of ancient civil law, canon law, and
common law, the legal profession dates back a further two millennia. The
modern legal profession with the research and practice linked dates back
three or four centuries. The design profession as a modern profession is
around a century old, depending on how you count, and design has only
been in universities for a few decades. The oldest university-based
design school in a research university is at Carnegie Mellon, dating to
the 1930s, and the majority of university design schools in universities
date back fewer than three decades.
In my view, our situation is quite different. Once we’ve produced a
few jurists such as Edward Coke, William Blackstone, and Louis Brandeis,
along with contemporary scholars such as William Ian Miller, Sonia
Sotomayor, or Stanley Fish, then I’ll be ready to worry that we have
too much research. Let’s get some solid research and writing done
before we worry about having too much of it!
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
Don Norman wrote:
—snip—
Design may be concerned about how it educates, deliberating between the
two poles of theory (aka research) and practice, but consider law. Here
is a wonderful article about the failures of modern law education in the
USA, where professors know lots of theory but nothing of how law is
actually practiced.
From the 20 Nov. 2011, Sunday New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-school-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html
I could write the same article about Business Schools. Actually, many
have complained that this situation applies to Engineering Schools as
well.
Design is still very practical. The challenge to those of us who want
more theory and breadth is to avoid falling into the legal trap that is
described in the article.
(That previous paragraph is especially important to people like me.Yes
we need to broaden design education for the 21st century, but the
primary goal is to produce practitioners. As universities more and more
require that design professors have PhDs and publish erudite articles in
refereed journals that are read only by other erudite professors, we
must not lose track of our craft. Yes, I am talking about me, among
others.)
—snip—
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