December 1st — Futures of Design Education

The final class in this seminar focused on futures of design education. Or as Dan put it, “How design education might evolve in the future.” Dan highlighted his choice of the world evolved because it’s “not like a magical process that’s going to happen on its own.” He stressed the critical ways in which designers shape the feedback loops that drive what design education becomes.

We started with some examples of design education in the week’s readings. Frederick van Amstel’s Anthropophagic Studio was first up.

One aspect highlighted was a table of alternate reading suggestions, part of a larger vision to “reimagine the design studio conceived from epistemologies of the South perspective and taking things from the Global North’s concept of an interaction design studio as part of design education… conceiving it in the Brazilian context.”

Other examples of critical differences were “looking at instead of problem solving, look at the work as overcoming oppression, instead of just design critique, it’s a social critique, and charity and the place of empathy.”

Another student reacted with their feelings of conflict between the studio’s support for those who want to follow the interaction design studio journey straight into industry versus others who want to explore “the deeper things” perhaps favored in the “right side” of the table above.

Dan raised a thoughtful question in response, wondering whether, “design studio work is based on an explicit theory at all?” Perhaps presenting these works as an A/B choice or substitution “makes some things seem a little bit more rooted in particular theory than they actually are.”

You might notice that Dan’s 2013 paper, Designing with Intent, does appear on the left side of the table. Unpacking this a bit led to some great discussion about whether the more “embodied aspect” of the Anthropophagic studio translates as well into practices that are perhaps more digital, like UX design.

This pulled at another big question from Dan, “How much responsibility is there for design and design educators to effectively prepare students for jobs and the demand of industry versus maybe transforming or changing those industries?” Is it better to prepare designers with specific skills for industry and jobs or more important to instill “a level of thinking or ability” to shape the industry itself?

One student expressed her enthusiasm for the “different perspective when approaching a digital space” created by the more physical approach of the Anthropophagic studio.

Ultimately, the Anthropophagic studio might represent a “small slice of resistance,” as Dan put it. Although it has perhaps not transformed the practice of design, or even its own university’s design program, maybe this alternative perspective has planted a seed for a different kind of design education and practice that can grow and spread over time.

Another student shared a reflection of how her time in studying design as an undergraduate was full of examples of peers being shaped by the institution — whether that meant changing their practice to seek a more lucrative job, or the very different change of one student who embraced religion and their own niche performance art practice. Two very different outcomes from the same environment.

Of course, we couldn’t ignore the opportunity to reflect on Carnegie Mellon’s place in this discussion. As a top research university for design, Dan suggested that CMU has “particular angles or presumptions” compared to other programs. For example, Dan highlighted how some of the speculative design projects highlighted last class really aimed at standing out and landing a job. By demonstrating work that is “clearly very clever and very creative and demonstrating skill,” graduates aimed to find more enriching and creatively freeing work as well. Contrast that to taking the approach of, “how well does this course train you to do what a recruiter for a big tech company wants you to do?”

Meyer & Norman — Changing Design Education for the 21st Century

At the risk of some cynicism, Dan started the discussion asking if this piece was just “conservatives thinking they’re being radical?” Are they saying “everything needs to change” and then proposing window-dressing type change? Do Meyer & Norman envision a world that is “effectively the existing model, but just with more designers in boardrooms” or as Chief Design Officers, Dan wondered.

Perhaps that somewhat cynical question stems from the very different experience of this classroom over the semester. As Dan saw it, “the discussions we’ve had over this semester and some of the things we looked at are 20 years ahead of this article.”

In response, one student questioned how funding might skew the way design “sits” between the social sciences and STEM in the academic setting. As designers are constantly trying to “show the value” of the discipline, will it remain a standalone field? Or will it be subsumed into other areas like anthropology that might hold the umbrella over topics like design anthropology or ethnography.

Another student saw a future where design practice at the graduate level might end up looking more like the way we currently study law — with practitioners from more varied disciplines and backgrounds (compared to what she noted as more heterogeneous design cohorts) who eventually specify into more functional areas of practice like technology law or criminal law. Inspired by “interest groups:” like design for public policy or design for emerging technology, she envisioned a path that might establish these as more formal paths of training.

This all points towards a discussion of whether design is “a subject in itself or more of a way of doing things,” as Dan noted. One student connected with that notion by mentioning the idea of “skills ontology” as it connected to efforts at a client who is attempting to categorize some 40,000 skills and capabilities, perhaps representing an effort to separate the “specific discipline” of a person and instead examine a more “dynamic snapshot” of that person’s skills. Dan wondered whether this approach might force designers to abandon the label/identity of “designer” and instead highlight skills like coordinating project execution and insight mapping. On the other hand, it might force students toward particular skills and limit their big-picture choices. It could be risky, for example, to train in “very particular technology or practice that then changes.” Would it be like listing Macromedia Flash 4.0 on your CV — doomed to the passing of technological trends? Although “Zoom Background Designer” might be a hit for 2020, “you may not want that to be the way that you’re defined,” Dan reminded us.

We closed the discussion of the Meyer & Norman piece with a quick but telling observation regarding the authors’ mention of “the excellent Bachelor of Design (BDes) program at Carnegie-Mellon University.” Dan noted that the authors (most likely Norman) tipped their hand here to potentially outmoded mental models with the simple addition of a hyphen. In this case, it was the hyphen connecting Carnegie and Mellon in the authors’ mentions of our home university — a punctuation mark eschewed institutionally since 1987 (in order to clarify the distinction between the Carnegie and Mellon roots of the combined entity).

Activity

The class (and the course) concluded with a team activity in Miro. First, students individually reflected on what could/should be in design education. Next, small groups were organized to imagine the redesign of design education along a particular direction.

1. Think about what things you think could/should exist as part of a design education. (10 minutes)
2. Pick a direction as a group, reflect on your own experience, then try to pick a direction and imagine how you would redesign design education. Does it center different voices? Take non-human perspectives? (15 minutes)

After the first round, a broad canvas of ideas, practices, and skills emerged. Interestingly, “few of the things people put down are specific skills, and many more are around applying theories or ways of thinking to design,” as Dan noticed. Dan asked students to reflect whether any of these ideas came from things they had experienced directly and benefited from, or whether they came from a sense of something missing.

One student noticed how inclusions like feminist theory or gender studies have been advancing ideas, like the pluriverse, for example, for some 60 or 70 years and are only now being acknowledged within the design canon. Another noted how a coding boot camp attended prior to starting at CMU had expanded beyond teaching only “technical skills” and also included a class focused on the “human skills” required to navigate in the workplace like allyship and how to approach issues with diversity in tech.

Dan also shared his own experience as a professor, noting how it can often be difficult to redesign courses from scratch, instead noting that they have a way of “inheriting structure” from what came before. He wondered whether a sort of living document featuring readings and different perspectives that designers “can pull from” might serve students more effectively. As it happens, one student mentioned that this sort of reading list and discussion is taking place organically.

Group 1 (Redesign the ‘design studio’ course) had a discussion centered around the real world context for design and how to work with others outside of the discipline. Dan noted that this philosophy of connecting design education to real-world needs and perhaps even partner organizations who might sponsor projects has its benefits, but also a potential drawback when students move to the next semester or a job and turn their attention elsewhere. Marysol added that “there’s also an aspect of making versus un-making,” of taking things apart or un-making them when they do not serve a purpose.

Group 2 (Redesign the structure(s) of (an) education) focused on the “need for multidisciplinary disciplines”, the role of time in education, and how barriers to entry, whether financial or GRE scores, might be eliminated. For example, what might happen if the GRE requirement was replaced by a design challenge? What if non-PhD students could pursue projects over the course of many years rather than a single semester?

As it happened, Dan had some experience with applications that featured a design challenge in a past university role, and brought his perspective to the discussion. He questioned whether it might have inadvertently “introduced more bias and subjectivity” in unintended ways. Ultimately, it didn’t feel like the right solution, but he noted that other systems like a lottery, common in many popular international programs, also have downfalls.

In Group 3 (Redesign from perspective(s) of centering different voices or cultures) a conversation more around “centering difference in complexity” and “understanding stories of becoming and ways of being” as well as access to knowledge. Whether this shows up in big, visible ways like having more diverse classrooms, or smaller ways, like reading authors in translation (or perhaps not so small when you consider the work of fixing the little things that don’t make sense in translation — thanks Marysol!). These ideas aimed to welcome complexity and critical discourse.

But pulling further at the thread of translation, for example, we see the larger root cause of knowledge work happening primarily in English at the university level. For example, a Dutch student shared that most research papers in her home country are being written in English to court a larger audience. Another wondered if we’d know who Arturo Escobar was if he didn’t speak English. In response, Dan wondered what might change if multilinguality were used as a hiring preference in higher education. Would these professors be better able to connect students to “other ways of thinking or other perspectives?”

Group 4 (Redesign from ecological or non-human perspectives) had a “big conversation around situated knowledge and objectivity and subjectivity,” as one student recounted. The conversation also turned to multidisciplinarity because of the necessary interactions between designers and those better able to understand how the non-human world is responding to their creations, like biologists or environmentalists. Ultimately, they saw the role of designers as “more of connectors and facilitators” than “hold[ing] the knowledge to everything.” There was also mention of the dangers of ignoring idigenous, spiritual, non-human and ecological perspectives, which do not dominate today’s design discourse.

Closing the exercise, Dan reminded the class that “there are not that many academic fields where there’s such an openness to learn from others.” He added, “I think it does enable design to be much more flexible and adaptive and open to things,” but also that “it has downsides as well.”