Jacques wrote:

**
Perhaps my comments about the IDSA and the NASAD accreditation standards
begin to situate Carma's comment about the ISO standards that you
mentioned. Like Carma, I do not believe that these are taught in programs
of industrial design. Why? Maybe design educators are not be aware of them
or, if they are,  do not consider them to be important. The ISO standards
are certainly not part of the NASAD accreditation standards for industrial
design. And why is that you ask? Maybe because the IDSA does not consider
them important or, more likely, does not want to be overly prescriptive.

And it is with the latter position that context becomes so important. Not
only is the US a buyer-beware context it is also a context with a kind of
Darwinian streak; that is, you succeed or fail because of your individual
ability, skill, determination, whatever. In other words, the system -
especially the government - should not intervene except in the most
fundamental way. As a case in point, the introduction of ISO standards, let
alone their imposition, could easily create a  knee-jerk reaction  because
these could be perceived as government intrusion. This does no mean that
large US corporate entities are not using such standards but they do not
appear to be mainstream.

**

I found this analysis really interesting...I haven't read the NASAD
guidelines (I believe they don't call them "standards," precisely to avoid
being too dictatorial) for industrial design for a couple of years now. I
think it's very possible that an update is being or will be published soon.
I believe I sat in on an editing session of the ID standards at the NASAD
meeting last year, in fact. I don't really recall standards being mentioned
other than perhaps generally, in passing. I don't know what the result
would have been if someone in the room had argued that knowing about (and
being able to comply with) ISO 9001 specifically was a crucial element to
include in the NASAD guidelines. I suspect that the group (I include myself
here) would have agreed that it would be all right to say something general
about the desirability for educating students about relevant (but
unspecified) international standards, but I just don't think NASAD wants to
dictate the content of curricula that specifically. Nor, as Jacques points
out, does IDSA. Nobody likes to be told what to do, and NASAD could easily
lose members (and thus much of its power) if it were to alienate too many
programs by being too strict about accreditation requirements.

Carma Gorman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Design Division
Department of Art and Art History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station D1300
Austin, Texas 78712–0337


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