My thoughts on Design Pedagogy

To begin with, I am not going to “diss” the “system” with a standard criticism of “everything is wrong and hence needs to be replaced” logic, that many of my colleagues like to propagate. I am writing this piece only to summarize my teaching experience and am rather interested in addressing and bringing to light some issues that I have come across in my brief and limited experience with academia.
I am an architect in a design college and have also taught in architecture schools for about 1.5 years. This article includes my discussions on pedagogy with various teachers and students. I have been involved in teaching both theoretical as well as practical subjects during this period.

My observations in design academia have been as follows-

1. The first issue I want to raise is of a myopic view of what design is, that exists in the design teaching. As an architecture student, I was always made to believe that it is the highest form of design that is possible while in a design school I am looked at as an outsider. Each branch of design is taught with a certain amount of ego coming from teachers as well as professionals. This ego is often mixed with a superiority complex, making them think that other designers are any less of designers than them. Eg.- Architects like to believe they can design posters/ logos, fashion designers think they are qualified enough to design interiors, etc. I do not wish to strengthen and solidify any kind of impenetrable walls between various disciplines, or try to imply that designing thinking from one field is completely incompatible for any other discipline, but that designers from any field don’t come with any omnipotence. They need to develop their skills and knowledge on anything new they work on, even in their own design field.
2. As one of my friends Ar. Thomas Oommen pointed out, designers like to believe that they have the scholarship to teach any subject in any way possible, without any actual qualification, or available resource material on the topic. We are constantly trying to revive and revise the pedagogy, without investing in the development of our teachers towards the newer knowledge. With an illusion of some sort of omniscience, we think we can hold such classes with old teachers and new systems. This means more money to flow into research, seminars, publishing, and workshops for teachers. We need to invest in the development of our faculty and resources for the subjects they may be keen in, and perhaps through this dilute the dichotomy between the student and teacher a little bit.
3. Technology has made classrooms redundant. Today there are enough books and reading material, videos, audio lectures, course guidelines etc. available for the student, for free, on the internet. Classes can be held through video conferences, almost all work happens through computers, and submissions can be emailed, and students can interact with people not only in their own but other design colleges across the world through social media. In such a scenario, students don’t feel the need to come to the class, especially since the availability of the teacher is not seen as a facility. In such a situation, the college is merely seen as a printer to dispense degrees by spending bare minimum required amount of time in it, that too as a printer whose degree holds marginally more importance than that of a correspondence course. Thus, the hierarchy of design colleges is maintained through their brand value as against their actual pedagogical and academic facilities. Perhaps the academia needs to re-look at the role of a college in this technological scenario.
4. There is an unnecessary pressure on teachers to “engage” students and teach them in increasingly more “fun” ways. The argument is made that students are running away from classes because they are- “too boring” for individuals of a generation which is used to “instant gratification” through technology. While there is no reason to undermine the importance of a good coach who can capture the attention of students through his/her ideas and delivery, it is not the base level requirement to be a teacher to be a spectacle. A teacher is required to gain knowledge on the relevant topic, and share it with students in a systematic fashion, depending upon the course structure. Engagement in class, as well as attention is as much a responsibility of students as a teacher. However, since, unlike teachers, the students have not sold their time for money, they don’t see the need to perform under pressure. Hence, it becomes easier for the administration to push teachers to attract students to classes. So for once and for all, I want to make it clear, that teaching is not entertainment industry, and teachers are under no obligation to “put up a show”, a la Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, for classes that might require straight-up reading, writing, drafting, and other time-consuming exercises that the students may find boring.
5. For some inexplicable reason, I see people only referring to education as a means to gain employment. The emotion is stronger in design education since they are seen as professional courses. Perhaps also because a lot of information that is imparted in design colleges is of technical nature. It may be noted that in the fast developing world that we inhabit, technology changes from the time the teacher has gained expertise on it, to the time it is delivered in the class. Even worse, till the time the students go out in the field to practice, it has moved even further away. Maybe that’s the reason design students can constantly be seen to crib about having taught “nothing” in the class. On this note, I see my classmates from college, going into diverse fields, most of which have little to no overlaps with the education they received in an architecture college, besides the attitude and ethics towards creativity. Hence, IMO, we need to make it explicit that the purpose of education is to shape attitudes and world-view of the student, which they may use in their professional life as they find suitable.
6. In my opinion based on limited observation, I have noticed that Indian parents see the act of raising their children as an investment, not only in the future of their child but also of their own. Their need to use the achievements of their children as badges to adorn their shoulder makes them think that sending their children to college is like shopping in a mall. As if the education of any kind, is a product lying on a counter in the supermarket of education industry (a word I hate to use), which they can buy for their whimpering nidifugous child. The properties of this product are talked about like great myths, and institutes run their brand identity almost as cults (which can particularly be seen in the case of NID, CEPT, SPA etc.). This kind of bourgeois attitude towards education gets translated into unnecessary pressure on students, as well as the teachers, forcing them to engage in a circus show of their abilities.
7. In my observation, it is much easier to make a professional than a designer, and perhaps that’s why the institutes over the nation are trying to push for an industry-centric approach, where the purpose of the education is to create more workforce. I think this is a very dismal, almost apocalyptic approach towards design education. This can be seen with an example of the IT industry, which because of its boom has been forced to employ unqualified and under-qualified personnel, due to work- load. This kind of workforce, through experience gains as much knowledge as a student, if not the conceptual understanding, and by completing their education through various correspondence (sometimes even fake) courses, are able to make competitive professional achievements, if not more, to their college going IT professionals, who then feel like having wasted their monetizable time in college, learning technology which was obsolete the minute they graduated. On the other hand, making a designer is a completely different task on an altogether separate level. To give one the critical skills and develop design thinking, that will widen their horizons for a professional niche they are capable of creating with their individual abilities, is not something that is possible entirely in a professional field.
8. Every time I meet a teacher, they want to talk about how much the “current system sucks” and how they have brilliant plans to change it. I want to clear few things here, firstly we have been revising our pedagogy to suit the taste of students with and increasingly lesser interest in design as a profession and still students are disappearing from the classes day by day. My colleagues like to brush away this strand of reality by saying that “no one really has answers”. This means three things in my opinion- The teachers are not indulging in the gargantuan work done in the field of pedagogy and hence are ignorant. It also means that perhaps we are looking at the wrong end of the problem. And lastly, once a student enrolls for a full-time course in a university, he or she is as much obliged to be present for classes as the teacher.
9. I want to put my foot down here for a second, and say that designing is a liberal arts issue, with one foot in technology. As designers, the knowledge of technology helps, but the idea is always to push the boundaries set by technology through creative solutions. We teach our students certain skills that engineers are required to learn as their full-time course work for four years, but the focus is to acquaint the students with them, and not to develop a mastery on the subject (unless as desired by an individual student). A designer’s training is essentially in communication with the visual and material world around us, and it is too complex of an issue that technology can alone address. Students need to learn politics, history, language, fine arts, etc. to develop their creativity and design thinking, which are all the subjects of liberal arts field, and yet we continuously shy away from theory as it will catch fire the minute we touch it. We also need to re-look at our own attitude towards students. To talk of their abilities to grasp knowledge is a simple case of ageism and stage-ism. In Liberal Arts, as well as Science colleges, the students of the same age are required to study everything from Derrida to Quantum Mechanics. Why then limit our first-year students to drawing pretty pictures and patterns, instead of a full-on critical discourse? I strongly feel the need to push for more informative than informal and fun classes, and throw the students at the deepest end of knowledge, while giving them time to find their way out of it, through rigorous reworking (not just working) on various exercises.
10. To sum it up all, I think the most important question that we face today as design academia is, why teach design? Why teach it at all when all information is out there, and students come to college only to buy a certificate for their parents and prospective life-partners? Why teach it when we don’t know what to teach and how to teach in design? Why teach it, in the world, where technology is so freely available and so user-friendly that anyone can design a website (even a house) in 5 minutes using all tools and instructions available on the internet? Perhaps by addressing the very basics of pedagogy in design, we would be able to move somewhere, if not closer to “bringing the students back to classes”.

Sincere apologies for a long rant, especially to my students and colleagues who, I would like to believe, have gotten used to, if not comfortable with, my highly opinionated ramblings. I would thus like to conclude by iterating that the above listed are only my personal ideas and experiences, which I would like you to comment upon and give suggestions towards, and should be taken as a mere argument instead of a definitive statement.