Purposive Drift

What should we be doing in Design Education?

I've just come across a thoughtful article by Ian Curry of Frog Design about design education. The whole article is well worth reading, but the two paragraphs I quote below seem to encapsulate dilemmas I have been wrestling with for years about create contexts for learning how to design:

"... Design is that rare field in which you can actually make thorough use of a liberal arts education. At frog, you will find many design generalists with backgrounds in the humanities, from anthropology and sociology to, in my case, comparative literature with an emphasis on Andean Indigenous poetry (not kidding). As a baseline, these people possess strong communication skills, which helps. But more valuable than what they know is the basic fact that they are comfortable, at least temporarily, in the state of not-knowing. Why is this important? In the time I have been at frog, I have worked on products used every day by individuals I began knowing nothing about, from stockbrokers to “tweens.” With my comparative literature degree in hand, I set off to gather information, draw parallels, synthesize, and yes, compare. Pretty much just what I learned to do trekking around Peru reading Quechua poetry. If you find yourself doing design research or planning online communities – typical emerging design tasks – your cultural studies degree is hardly going to prove more useful in any other non-academic field.

“Fine with me,” you may say, “but who is going to actually design my damn [insert thing]?” Fair question. We need to teach our designers how to think, but we must teach them also how to design. Adaptive Path’s Dan Saffer addressed the issue in a recent blog post bluntly titled “Design Schools: Please Start Teaching Design Again.”8 In it, he stakes a claim for the value of the traditional design education, arguing that design schools who are jumping on the “design thinking” bandwagon “are doing a serious disservice to their students by only teaching them ‘design thinking’ when a class in typography or mechanics or drawing might not only give them a valuable skill, but also teach them thinking and making and doing — all at the same time.” Such programs equate design with fields of study like semiotics, which are studied without any real intent of application. Yet at the end of the day, a designer still needs to know how to make ideas into realities. We are not hired to analyze only, but to turn that analysis into creation. In tailoring our schools for this new realm of “design thinking,” we have maintained the thinking part, but have lost touch with that which makes our work specifically design. We have wandered, in both our schools and our profession, from that “specific context” which transforms strategic thinking into design."