Dear all, but especially Terry and Anton:

Anton (or anton) recently wrote that

> If it were not for Terry's contributions (provocative often insightful) this list would not debate very much at all.

Yes, perhaps. But I have two rejoinders to that claim.

1). I do not subscribe to this list because I want to receive lots of
argumentative emails. I dread them. They make me feel anxious, so much
so that I even unsubscribed from the list for a few months--maybe it
was even a full year or two--at one point when I grew especially
frustrated with the tenor of the postings. I re-subscribed last
year--even though the character of the posts had changed not a
whit--because what I do like about this list are the international
calls for papers and fellowship announcements and research queries
(many of which I in turn forward to the design-studies-forum-l list).
However, those information-sharing posts aside, I would actually
prefer to see fewer, more thoughtful, and more diplomatically worded
posts on this list--in other words, less "debate" of the sort that has
been customary here. I would argue that the volume of debate on a list
is not necessarily an indicator of its utility to its subscribers, and
for me, at least, the two may even be inversely related.

(I should note that I'm no newbie to discussion lists, either: I'm a
very happy long-term member of many other lists whose subscribers use
them primarily as a means to pick colleagues' brains about
bibliography, or to ask the whereabouts of "lost" art objects, or to
inquire whether anyone has seen a particular construction technique
before, or other very reasonable queries that are politely and humbly
asked, and usually gratefully and publicly acknowledged. I reply to
many of those queries off-list, and enjoy that kind of academic
sociability very much. Occasionally debates arise on those lists about
deaccessioning of museum collections, or about historic preservation
issues, but the discussions usually strike me as very civil and even
productive. Unfortunately, I have never had warm feelings of that sort
toward the phd-design list. When I have occasionally asked for
bibliographic suggestions (on fairly well defined topics on which I've
already done the basic homework, I might add), I've either received
very few replies, or, occasionally, some rather hostile ones
off-list.)

2). I suspect that if some of the more dominating voices on this list
were a little less vocal, maybe some new voices would emerge from the
shadows, mine included. As I write this I realize that if I'd like to
see that happen, I probably need to stop lurking and plunge in. So
here goes.

**
My response to Terry's original post:

Terry began the design history thread on August 21, 2012 with the
claim that "it appears there is a need to rethink Design Education in
ways that have a much less central  role for   'Design History', and,
in terms of the length of time Design education has now been a
university discipline, this rethinking would appear to be becoming
overdue."

This was actually the part of Terry's message that surprised me most,
though I have not yet seen anyone on the list respond specifically to
that claim. I know that in the UK, and perhaps in Australia as well,
design history can claim to be a "university discipline" and even to
have a "central role" in design education. But I assure you that this
is still not the case at many, if not most, institutions in the USA.
Indeed, David Raizman and I have been running sessions on teaching
design history (this year will be our third in a row) at the National
Association of Schools of Art and Design's (our accrediting agency's)
annual meetings. In those sessions we have been trying to persuade the
art/design school administrators in attendance that it might be a
really great idea to replace some of their design students' required
art history courses with design history courses. This is still a
rather novel concept in some quarters, so I really can't agree
that--in the USA at least--design history has any sort of "central
role" in design education. Frankly, I think design students here are
very lucky if they get to take even one course in design history.
There are surprisingly few people in this very large country who seem
to self-identify primarily as design historians rather than as art or
architectural historians or designers. So before we in the US start
"rethinking" the role of design history in design education, I'd like
to suggest that we (in many cases) need to think about it seriously
for the first time. Even though some of you may find design history
retardataire or obsolete, if the alternative is having design students
take four classes in art history in order to follow NASAD's
guidelines, then offering design history as an alternative sounds
pretty appealing to me (and, I suspect, would to most design students
as well).

That said, maybe NASAD guidelines do need to change to emphasize
theory over history--I would be very willing to discuss this
proposition if anyone else on the list cares to explain what kind of
theory they have in mind, and present a good argument for why it
should replace some or all of the history in the curriculum (indeed, I
already embrace this idea in some of the courses I teach). But so long
as the majority of my students enter my classes unable to name the
century in which Gutenberg worked, have never heard of Art Nouveau,
and have no idea that our own culture's interest in the environmental
impact of design is a phenomenon of quite recent historical origin,
then I think they need at least some coursework in design history (as
well as design theory) if they hope to have any pretensions of
positioning themselves in the future as educated professionals rather
than as software technicians.

If anyone would like to discuss (as opposed to debate) what an
undergraduate or graduate history/theory/criticism curriculum for
designers should or could look like, I'd be happy to talk with you,
either on- or off-list. I am familiar with the proposed curriculum
that floated around some years ago as part of the plans to create a
design school at UC Irvine (or was it a different UC?), but I felt
that that curriculum was sorely deficient in coursework in
history/theory/criticism (so much so that I wonder whether it would
have been accredited by NASAD without modifications).

I'm curious: those of you in the USA, who do work within NASAD
guidelines, how would you like to see those guidelines for design
degrees rewritten? What do you think an ideal history/theory/criticism
curriculum would look like? Please let me know if you are interested
in talking about these (and related) questions.

thanks,
Carma R. Gorman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, School of Art and Design
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Associate Editor/Lead Reviews Editor, Design and Culture