–Engage

Recently I posted a bit about design education. I realized this evening that the 13 points that I made in that post were very one sided. They are sided heavily on the vocational requirements of design education. I even go so far as to say in #13 that design is practice and students and teachers a like need to keep up with industry as part of their education and career development.

This framing though is not precise or complete. While a huge part of design education is to create designers, the academy that education is embedded in has another calling which is to create knowledge. It is not the only place to create knowledge, but educational institutions that are part of the academy have gone to great lengths to create protections for educators so that they can serve the dual purpose of imparting and creating knowledge.

Like I said there are other areas that create knowledge, even in industry. The R&D divisions of many corporations serve this purpose. However, they do this w/o the protection of tenure for academic teacher-researchers or the insulation from the quarterly report.

But my focus on the vocational education has 2 sources. 1. Because a good 99% of my career has been in industry and I am not raised within the academy, though I’ve had a bit of experience with it; and 2) Because I do not work in the academy as an educator, I work in a teaching college, or as SCAD (my employer) likes to call it a “student-based” university. Our tagline is even “The University of Creative Careers.” This really demonstrates our focus on preparation.

However this does not always translate fully and clearly. We require that most of our MFAs need to present “new knowledge” as part of their thesis work. This definitely suggests that the school supports at least the students doing research.

But my greater point I’d like to discuss is that knowledge actually needs to be part of all areas of education and practice. When organizations like RKS, Adaptive Path, Coooper, InContext, ForUse, IDEO, HFI, NN/G, etc. codify their inner workings and share it with the world they are creating knowledge and taking part in all of our educations and added to the total knowledge pool of design.

But what makes this all so interesting is that industry doesn’t want to foot the bill of education taking the time to “create knowledge” unless that knowledge is easily applied to their POV … and this is a great shame.

So I will add #14 to my list of what design education needs to be.

14. Space for exploration, discovery, practice, and unjudged failure.
These are as much learning tools as knowledge creation tools. We need to see what works, how it works, and well why it can’t work. The room to fail, not without repercussions, but without drastic repercussions. And with a little serendipity, maybe these failures will add up to new knowledge.

It seems of late in my life there have been a perfect storm of events driving me to focus my attention on re-designing design education. As many if you know, I’m a professor of interaction & industrial design at the Savannah College if Art & Design (SCAD). So obviously the last year+ of my professional life has led me to reflect a lot about the curriculum I teach & for whom I do that teaching (both the college & the students). I ask myself daily if what I’m doing is preparing my students for professional life as robust, multifaceted designers and if the institution whose structure & culture I am somewhat bound by is appropriate for achieving those goals? There is even the question of whether or not the right students are matched together to allow them to succeed, or should the institution & teacher in tandem be able to teach anyone anything all the time?

Here are 12 qualities of design and design education I think will be driving the next wave of design educators.

1. Knowing, Making, Thinking, Processing
We know that these 4 things are core to any type of design. I need too have knowledge about design to know what is right. I need to know how to make something. I need to know what I should make. And lastly I need to know how to get there. Too often programs especially in classical disciplines like Industrial Design, Graphic Design and Architecture focus on Knowing and Making. But the opposite is true of discipline like Interaction & Service design which focus on Thinking and Processing. The system needs to be more balanced.

2. It takes a multi-facetted individual
Or at least an individual who is steeped enough in general design theory and criticism to understand the specialized roles (disciplines) it takes to make a specific project come alive. Way too often leadership of projects are in the hands of people who don’t know what they don’t know. This is as much a sin of arrogance as it is a sin of ignorance.

3. Communicating visually is always important
I don’t care if you are designing sound systems. You have to be able to present your work visually for so many reasons: to communicate to stakeholders (the obvious one) but also to have visual thinking as a primary tool for creatively engaging idea conception.

4. Design is not a service to business …
… design is a core partner of the business. But this means that designers need to have communication, language, and process skills that speak to businesses. But we need to do this by utilizing our strengths, not by assimilating. Be visual; tell stories.

5. The data must flow (to paraphrase Dune)
We have to consider multiple sources and multiple types as data not just as sources for inspiration, but when modelled as guideposts to help keep us on track.

6. However, data and the designer’s vision need to create a narrative.
We as designers need to be better experts at framing the narratives embedded within our  designs. Emotional Ballands must be song from the designs we make.

7. School is not an end
Industry needs to step back into its role as completer of young designer’s educations. Too many have forsaken the value of the internship and even more now expect a skill level of the new undergraduate that does a disservice to them and their school’s ability to create that agent. I think there is also a missed opportunity here for Industry to do a better job of leading through eduction.

8. All designers should have the same foundation
Simply put, we need to start out all designers with t he following basic skills: drawing/visual thinking, movie making, improvisation, programming (as in computers), visual communication, design criticism/history.

9. And then follow this up with concentrations
Whether that is graphics, industrial design, architecture, interaction design, service, etc. A solid education in design should actually force at least 2 concentrations on every designer.

10. There is no single community of practice that owns any design situation,
but rather the many facets of a design engagement force individuals and teams to inhabit any combination of design communities and discipines in order to be at their best.

11. Multi-lingual and well-travelled
The best deigns are ones that cause a shift in the way people think about the insertion o f any collection of artifacts. To create new frames is as much a practiced art form as it is a requirement of practice for the designer. Experience in language and travel helps foster the skills necessary to create frames beyond your own mind’s eye.

12. Human beings are creatures embedded into a social system.
That system is in reflexive dialog with itself causing seemingly server turbulence. By becoming experts in history and social theory/practice we are better prepared to take on feasible and repeatable design projects with massive impact.

So these are my 12 items. What are your thoughts on design and education?

UPDATE (3/31/2010 Due to Vicky’s comment below)

13. This is a professional practice …
… and it can really only be practiced (under mentorship) in industry. This is as true for students as it is for teachers. Students have to follow through on required internships and cooperatives and even teachers should be afforded opportunities that keep them tied to industry practice throughout their career. I’m not advocating adjunct professorships as I see flaws in having teaching being moonlighting, but I did post this diddy not too long ago.

I’m working on a little project about IxDA (The Interaction Design Association). As one of its primary founders, I often am in a position to represent IxDA to a much wider audience, or to communicate with other communities as a non-official representative. It’s an awkward position to be in, but it is also fun (I must admit).

That being said, I am very aware that my view of IxDA is warped by my personal experience. So before this next venture I’m about to begin, I’d like some perspective for you all.

Below in the comments please add your story. What  has IxDA meant to you? Is there a story where the context of IxDA helps shapes some sort of epiphany, relationship, business transaction, design, joy, etc. that would not have existed at all or as easily with out IxDA in the picture?

I look forward to your stories. Be as brief or as long as you want. Some of these stories in part or in whole may be used in the project I’m working on.

And THANX! in advance.

It is often said that interaction design evolved out of the requirement to stem the tide of the ever increasing amount of complexity in our personal lives due to technology. Design & engineering a like had to encompass a personal/human view of the effects that inserting their creations would have on the people who would encounter them (directly or indirectly).

To do this type of work required the creation and assimilation of tools from all manner of the world of art, design & engineering. Basically, we created THE most complex hard to understand and do discipline and practice, to help others mitigate complications due to complexity (said wordily on purpose).

People today have been grappling with where does IxD end and where does service design begin. Hell if I know (or care). Just like I can’t tell you where [fit old design discipline here: Arch, ID, GD, etc.] ends and IxD begins and you shouldn’t care either. What I do know is that there is a new group of people who are creating a community–a vibrant and productive one–which isn’t even really all that new relative to our fast-paced world, that “knows” what service design is, why its important and how to do it. No self respecting IxD with half a sense of integrity could argue that they exist.

Today I was giving a lecture that I first wrote in 2005 about the “history of IxD”. It is all predicated on the sense that our discipline emerged b/c of the need of human consideration by those who were grappling with placing ever increasing complex technologies in the context of the aforementioned humans. Further, we juxtaposed this to the birth of other disciplines like interactive design/art and realized that we can’t do our jobs well without considering aesthetics and classical design disciplines are much better at that than us, so lets look to them for guidance.

Along the way though, we realized that there was much in the world outside of technology that was either already more complex than it had to be, or whose complexity existed outside the ream of technology itself, even if technology enabled that complexity to happen in the first place. Institutions like travel & hospitality, financial services, health services, even retail have become so complex that like the graphical interfaces of yore human beings are being left with the same feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Service designers had to emerge to tackle these issues using new tools and to come up with new frames (such as collaboration) in order to take that same spirit of human consideration that is so rooted in interaction design and apply it to new areas of complexity. Like metaphor was used to bridge the distance between system and mental models in technological systems, so too will new rhetorical devices and frames will be used towards bridging whatever it is that is lacking between the system and human being within services.

All this is to say that at least for myself (and maybe for you now) I now have an understanding of the context that helps me thinking about services better in comparison to my core skillsets, and allows me to engage services in a new way.

I’d be interested to hear what self-identified service designers are thinking in this regards and if this framing at all might help you speak to interaction and other designers understand what it is you do.