4D Design at Cranbrook: Projections For A New Model of Interaction Design Education
Carla Diana, Cranbrook Academy of Art, United States
What if a design program enabled student work to flow freely from physical manifestations to digital ones, and vice versa? What if there were no set classes, but the directive to students pursue individual passion projects while an ever-evolving, curated collection of visiting designers challenges them with intensive charettes? What if students were selected to build upon one another’s knowledge, rather than rely on professors to deliver a codified body of information?
These questions are part of my current exploration as founder and head of the 4D program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a storied institution with a well-established tradition in American design education and an ongoing reputation for bleeding edge experimentation. During the Interaction 2019 Educational Summit, I discussed the vision for the new 4D Design department which will build on Cranbrook’s unique pedagogy and run as a design laboratory for creative applications of emerging technology. My presentation sought to project a possible future for design education, with the hopes of following up on how the program unfolds through presentations at future Educational Summits.
In addition to the opportunity to start from a clean slate in 2018 when many interaction design programs are reaching a moment of maturity, Cranbrook has a radically different pedagogical model in that there is no traditional class structure. The Department Head (who is also Designer in Residence) works with each student individually to chart a course for the two-year program while also curating a collection of visiting designers and artists who both inspire students and work directly with them through workshops and charrettes that target specific topics such as coding, mixed reality, tangible interaction and storytelling. The cohorts are also selected to complement one another so that the studio community becomes a core part of a collaborative education effort.
About Cranbrook’s 4D Design MFA Program
Cranbrook’s 4D Design MFA program was established during the 2018–19 academic year and is currently accepting its first cohort of students who will start in the fall of 2019. The first cohort of 4D Design will indeed be a group of pioneers. They will benefit from the opportunity to make design history, serving as the foundation for the Academy’s first new department in 47 years.
4D Design centers around a communal studio environment where exceptional designers and artists explore the intersection of the physical and the digital to create prototypes, products, and provocations in the form of interactive objects, dynamic displays, and mixed reality environments.
The program is focused on exploring critical questions about the world around us through creative applications of emerging technology. It includes everything from augmented reality to applied robotics and 3D printing, and the essence of it is around products and experiences that are responsive. The common thread is that all of these things will have the ability to change over time through intrinsic behaviors such as light patterns, sound, motion and other dynamic displays.
Key areas of exploration include dynamic product behaviors, expressive coding, systems visualization, embedded electronics and applied robotics, connected devices and product ecosystems, mixed reality experiences, voice control and conversational interfaces, artificial intelligence systems, 3D printing and material creation, biometrics, prosthetics, and augmentation and telepresence and avatars.
4D Design offers students the opportunity to build a hybrid design practice where the creative and the technical hold equal weight. It encourages a holistic look at dynamic design elements as well as a focus on overall context in terms of place, time and ergonomics. Rather than having designers focus on what’s on a screen, we are finally at a place and time where the value of thinking about how spaces and objects can be imbued with data and interact with people is more clearly recognized.
4D Designers will need to be adept at envisioning possible future experiences, so students will practice techniques such as scenario storyboarding, video illustration, and body-storming or play acting to get a sense of how elements unfold over time. They will gain strategies for looking at today’s academic research and extrapolating how it might be incorporated into everyday life in the future. In addition they will work on becoming comfortable with code, and adept at working with electronics prototyping platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry PI. Above all, they will aim to be nimble in leveraging resources such as open source software and collaborative learning tools so that they can work with the constantly moving target of technology.
Projects will include both the exploratory and the speculative. Students will explore concepts through physically prototyped experiences that are hand-crafted by an individual or team of students. One example might be a robotic garden that tends itself and perhaps adjusts its yield to match dietary needs over time. Other student work may be driven by questions that require envisioning possible futures in a more speculative way, such as a thought-provoking video of a robot designed to serve the emotional needs of people in hospitals. The 4D Design mantra is, “Ask questions, poke holes, and try the future on for size”.
A Hybrid Studio, Mixing Backgrounds In Art, Design and Technology
The goal in recruiting is to develop a studio that is made up of people with creative backgrounds and those with technical backgrounds. The program welcomes applicants with a foundation in engineering and/or computer science knowledge who want to be immersed in a rigorous culture of creative practice and critical thinking, as well as those with significant design, art, or architecture experience who wish to focus their work on technological implications to pursue a higher level of discourse. Each cohort will be comprised of a carefully curated mix of individuals whose viewpoints and skill sets complement one another. While it is not expected that every student has experience in art and design, applicants are expected to showcase aesthetic sensibility, and demonstrate the ability to visually tell stories.
No Traditional Classes
The curriculum in structured in such a way that there are no traditional classes, but rather a curation of pedagogical experiences and an intense focus on individual studio project development and critiques. Students will work directly with the program head to customize their own experiential learning by setting milestones, establishing project deliverables and identifying resources that serve their unique goals and interests. A communal studio environment fosters knowledge sharing and a culture of evolving critical discourse. Additionally, internationally-renowned visiting artists, designers, and theoreticians contribute to the pedagogy through inspirational lectures, small group critiques, intensive charrette challenges, and hands-on workshops. Key skills in technology use and storytelling techniques will be addressed through boot camps and strategic design prompts. 4D Design students will become well versed in open source, community supported tools, adopting methods and techniques on an as-needed basis to pursue creations that build upon our key areas of exploration.
4D Design, like all the programs at Cranbrook, is best for students who are interested in developing a unique voice as a designer or artist. As a making-based studio culture, it’s ideal for someone who seeks to challenge themselves through self-directed project work. It is not the right fit for someone looking for a highly structured curriculum of traditional-style instruction. Students must be self-directed, highly motivated and ready to embark on a journey of personal transformation.
Projected Career Paths
There are four main career paths projected for graduates of the 4D Design Program:
1. Interaction design. Working as a practicing designer for clients or within a company. Graduates will use the methods that are commonly employed by interaction designers at consulting firms such as frog Design, Smart Design, and Argo Design or at large companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Samsung or HP. Their work may also be applied to experimental advertising design. Our program will have a particular focus on interaction in the physical world so our graduates will be suited to jobs that are emerging in the area of physical interaction design.
2. Entrepreneurship. Building an independent practice based on freelance work or student-initiated ideas. As our area of exploration will yield many new ideas employing creative uses of technology, there will be demand for 4D designers on a per-project basis, and some project concepts may lend themselves to the creation of new products and services. Graduates may seek to join incubators to gather support for transforming their ideas into new businesses.
3. Art practice. While our program is based on design practice, some graduates will choose a fine art application of 4D design, pursuing opportunities to show work in galleries.
4. Academia. As an MFA is the terminal degree for design, many graduates will choose to teach, either in a full-time position or as a part-time role to supplement work as an independent designer or artist. A quick look at art and design school in North America (and many throughout the world) reveals that a large percentage of Cranbrook alumni are selected as leaders in academia, teaching courses, conducting high-level art and design research, and running highly respected departments at top institutions. We expect 4D Design graduates to follow in this trend, expanding our leadership into the areas of new media arts, interaction design, and design technology.
The above are four examples of post-graduate paths that we envision 4D Design students following, however as the nature of work itself is evolving we will see an increasing number of people creating career paths that had not previously been imagined. We expect 4D design students to be particularly innovative in inventing new avenues for combining creative work and technology.
Benefits of Cranbrook’s 4D Design Program
- Focus on the physical-digital. The 4D Design program has a unique focus on interactivity in the physical world. Students will be challenged to consider how our objects and surroundings are transformed by the data running through them. With its deep history in crafts-based disciplines such as metalsmithing, ceramics and fiber, 4D Design students will be encouraged to pursue the craft of code and electronics while respecting the importance of details throughout any project.
- Studio and critique-based learning. Our non-traditional course structure (we have no set classes) allows the program to be nimble in responding to today’s shifting technological landscape. We can stay on the cutting edge because we are not beholden to established courses that may quickly become out of date.
- Breathtaking surroundings. Cranbrook’s amazing 300 acre National Historic Landmark campus is an exhilarating place to learn, grow, explore contemplate and, ultimately, develop a unique voice.
- Critical Studies. All departments at Cranbrook benefit from the Critical Studies program, the central piece of the academic program. Each semester, a visiting Critical Studies Fellow will present perspectives on contemporary theory and culture studies through public lectures, student discussion groups, and studio critiques and reviews.
- Two museums. The larger Cranbrook educational community encompasses the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Institute of Science, both which offer 4D Design students opportunities to showcase work and collaborate with world-class researchers in art, design and science.
- Interdisciplinary dialog. As a community, Cranbrook encourages students to challenge the notion of traditional disciplines and encourages all students to explore combining media as a means to discover new modes of expression. Students may opt to take electives in a department outside their major, giving them the opportunity to delve deeply into another discipline.
- Conceptual making. The foundation of the Cranbrook experience is experimentation and exploration, paving the way for 4D Design students to be true pioneers in pushing the boundaries of art and design.
Two Year Curriculum
While in some ways it’s accurate to describe the 4D Design program as having “no classes”, it’s much more like one big class that spans the two years, punctuated by critical milestones along the way.
When students arrive they will set up a studio space that’s all their own, in a larger space that’s shared by the entire department. Weekly critiques will take place to offer an in-depth discussion and guidance for individual students.
To expose students to skills and develop a shared language of making, boot camps in coding, image manipulation, electronics and physical prototyping will be offered in the first year. In addition, our 4D Design Catalysts will work with students to inspire creativity and pose design challenges. In some cases the Catalysts will visit campus and offer a lecture and workshop. In other cases we may arrange a class visit to a studio that is of particular interest.
Each year in Fall, then again in Spring, one week is set aside for a schedule of particularly rigorous critiques called Reviews. Unlike the weekly departmental critique process, during Reviews each student meets with Artists-in-Residence from across the Academy, and thus from across multiple disciplines, to discuss his or her work. In the Fall semester, all second-year students prepare a body of work for review, followed in the Spring semester by the first-year students. There are many goals in this process, but chief among them is for students to gain critical feedback on their specific developmental trajectory from a variety of disciplinary and critical viewpoints at a very high level. This process is a significant component of the Academy’s structure, one that encourages a rich trans-disciplinary conversation.
The two years culminate in a Master’s Statement and a Degree Exhibition that is attended by the entire Cranbrook community, its benefactors, visiting critics, journalists, and collectors. Because the degree show is open to the public, it requires students to exhibit work under professional and public standards.
Figure 1 describes a summary of the two-year plan.
The Road Ahead
As the program will welcome its first cohort this coming fall, there is a great deal of work to be done to establish the vision described in this paper. The plan will be evaluated on a yearly basis to examine how well students are served by the varied activities, particularly those that are unique to this program, as opposed to others at Cranbrook. We will track our graduates closely in the years to come, as their pursuits after the program will serve as a key measure for success in the years ahead.
Slides of the Presentation
About Carla
Carla Diana is a designer, author and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. She has designed a range of products from robots to connected home appliances, and her designs have appeared on the covers of Popular Science, Technology Review and the New York Times Sunday Review.
Carla has been granted the honor of creating the 4D Design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, serving as its first Designer in Residence; it will begin accepting students in Fall 2019. She is an ongoing collaborator with the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the University of Texas, Austin, where advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are manifest in expressive robots.
Carla writes and lectures frequently on the social impact of robotics and emerging technology and created the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince. She is a coauthor of a forthcoming book on smart object design to be published by Harvard Business Review Press and currently cohosts the Robopsych Podcast, a biweekly discussion around design and the psychological impact of human-robot interaction.
She holds a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Cooper Union and an M.F.A. in 3D Design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
cdiana@cranbrook.edu
https://cranbrookart.edu/departments/4d-design/
