![[Image: Illustration by Alina Günter]](/database/images/display/sb4980c30e067d9.jpg)
DESIGNING DESIGN EDUCATION
Tim Marshall
In this month's Education Feature from Form magazine, author Tim Marshall seeks to describe the role of today's design education on the future generation of designers. Europe and the United States have seen a shift in design education influenced by ethical issues, philosophy, innovative technology and a regard for the environment and different cultures.
The author maps the history of design learning throughout different design movements, up to the recent progressive shift into interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary design education, which requires collaboration and communication between design fields. The challenge for European and American institutions still lies in structuring their design programs to cater to their differing students' needs, regional economic systems and government support and emerging trends and design professions.
Illustrations by Alina Günter www.alinaguenter.ch
After a period of consensus regarding how to educate the next generation of designers, design education in Europe and the United States is going through a period of ethical, philosophical, technological, ecological, and cultural challenges. New media and digital technologies, the increasingly global audience, clients, markets, production of design, designs' role in the growing ecological crisis, and, most recently, the progressive shift of the center of design activity toward the emergent economies make the question of how best to educate the future designer an interesting challenge.
Is design education training people with job-ready skills, inducting graduates into professional life or educating students to be citizen designers? While a program of study is usually framed with these three dynamics in mind, the question of the relative importance of each of them is critically important and reflects the educational ethos of a time, an economy, and an institution. The importance of this framing can be seen in the historic shifts of the structure of design learning. The industrial revolution framed learning through the material-based logic of guilds (such as printing, wood, metal, textiles) and the modernist period professionalised the crafts (graphic, product, interior, and fashion design for example). In the late twentieth century the relative emphasis shifted again and design education began to give priority to design's capacity to organise transdisciplinary processes through sustainable design, service design, design management and innovation, and design thinking.
Left: Often the people who teach at a design school are even more important than its educational concept: The Wing Chair by Joa Herrenknecht was created during Stefan Diez's guest professorship at the HfG Karlsruhe. Here it stands in Professor Volker Albus's room.
Right: Tracy Gromek from the Parsons The New School for Design designed the sports equipment FiiWA (Freedom in Interactive Wearable Art) which enables visually impaired people to play in a group. The range includes sensor vests, armbands, goal pad, and this ball, while vibration and sound signals serve as orientation aids.
The environmental consequences of design's role in shaping behaviours, promulgating lifestyles in the imagination, and driving consumption demanded a response. If design could be a force for ecological harm could the same process be reconfigured to ensure beneficial ecological outcomes? This attempt to design for sustainability has brought a previously nascent quality of design into prominence – the organisation of a multi-disciplinary engagement with complex issues and problems, especially those that cannot be 'solved' in a linear sense, only iteratively improved over time and place. Design expertise in this context becomes the ability to edit, organise, and integrate various expert perspectives and their respective data sources. The design process repeatedly visualises and prototypes collaboratively proposed actions and these are taken back to the multi-disciplinary teams in the hope of determining an effective intervention.
The learning mode in schools pursuing this approach is likely to shift away from or modify the modernist Bauhaus notion of 'foundational' skills and toward the pursuit of core qualities inherent to the design process such as the ability to collaborate and communicate, a capacity for empathy, the capability to articulate design insights to those outside the field, and to think and act strategically. These changes are not unique to design education, as there is a growing emphasis across the university, as well as in the commercial world, on interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary modes of learning and practicing. Indeed a number of universities are, or are considering, restructuring to have this approach become the defining logic of the whole institution.
The design schools that are prominent in developing this trans-disciplinary and strategic approach are typically either situated within a university or have substantive collaborative partnerships with 'non-design' institutions. Examples of this in the US include the Illinois Institute of Technology, the 'd-school' (a collaboration between the design consultancy IDEO and Stanford University), the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (Canada), and the newly formed School of Design Strategies within my school, Parsons The New School for Design. In Europe there are The University Institute of the Arts, Helsinki, Goldsmiths in London, the Köln International School of Design, and the Milano Polytechnico. Importantly, the Jan van Eyck Academy and the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands also developed contemporary approaches exploring design's social and political agency.
Recent changes in European Union policy are affecting design education on the 'Continent'. European design pedagogy had been largely based on the 'Werkbund model' of the Bauhaus Academy of Design and the more socially progressively version at the Ulm School of Design, which was an advanced, philosophically framed design apprenticeship. The Bauhaus and Ulm approaches strongly influenced US art and design education where design fundamentals were developed before progressing to be 'masters of form' in one area or another. The faculty was almost always made up of practicing artists and designers imparting their professional expertise to the student body largely unfiltered by bureaucratic controls and expectations.
Unlike Europe, the US government has a very weak role in dictating the overall direction of education. Private colleges and universities are the norm for art and design education, which has developed in relatively 'organic' and erratic ways, as a result. European schools are for the most part government funded and can be directly affected by changing government priorities. The UK, for instance, developed the highly structured and government-mandated Quality Assurance system that resulted both in a leveling of the educational quality between schools and a steadier, more iterative development of the whole design education sector. As a result, the UK design schools have a very strong emphasis on pedagogy and the standardisation of the units of learning that allow for an exchange of credits across the whole educational system. This increased emphasis on pedagogy has also meant a shift toward the career art and design educator providing the institutional framework for programs of study.
Right: Together with Adidas, Susanne Schöpka designed a mountain bike shoe conceived for women. Following completion of her final project, the manufacturer took on the FH München graduate.
Left: Honda study Oree by Offenbach students Niko Albertus and Andre Look.
In 1999, the EU enacted the Bologna agreement that required all member countries to adopt the UK and US systems of Bachelor and Masters degrees. This replaces the four-to-five year Design Diploma. The European Union has decided that the UK modularised system of educational units (courses or credits) transferable across the whole system is essential to its vision of the EU as a global leader in education. Maintaining a healthy diversity of approaches and styles while conforming to the basic requirements of the framework is a dilemma with which many schools still struggle. The legacy in both Europe and the US that the Bachelors degree delivers all that is needed for a professional design career further complicates the model. This results in the 'learning space' being overloaded by specific content at the moment when, arguably, the designer needs to be more broadly educated to manage increased complexity.
The verb, to design, indicates a human capacity: a very broadly inclusive term that includes, but is not defined by, the profession of design. If one accepts this, then it frames an understanding of design that can directly inform the constitution of the academic field of design in the future academy. Design structures our lives, interactions, consumption, democratic and governmental processes, and so on, to such a degree that a basic comprehension of how design 'works' should be required as part of a general education. Carnegie-Mellon University, Goldsmiths University, The New School and North Carolina State University are examples among others of academies that are exploring the potential of this approach institutionally. For this approach to succeed, designers also need to abandon positioning design as a secretive and privileged process in favor of a fluid and porous approach that situates design as the shared practice of societies and cultures with the designer enabling general participation through professional facilitation.
The consensus about what constitutes the fundamentals of a 'good' design education has been largely broken. While design educators can wax evangelical about 'their' model being 'the' model, it is empirically true that, very often, successful designers have not had an education that focused narrowly or exclusively on design, and great designers have emerged from a range of places, life experiences, and educational settings. There is no universal recipe. Institutions have to define and be clear about their place in a larger set of offerings. Increasingly, students have to assess which learning mode and institutional approach best suits them and accept that 'designing' their own education is in and of itself an important education. One student will need strong skill sets from the beginning to develop confidence before being able to move forward while another will be better suited to approach design with a broader liberal arts education and gain a more expansive world-view to understand what they want to do with design. It seems counter-intuitive to our current condition to determine a new consensus on design education between Europe and the US, and the 'design action' may very well be somewhere altogether different – in the emerging economic countries.
This article was originally published in Form magazine, Issue 224, and has been republished with permission.
In this month's Education Feature from Form magazine, author Tim Marshall seeks to describe the role of today's design education on the future generation of designers. Europe and the United States have seen a shift in design education influenced by ethical issues, philosophy, innovative technology and a regard for the environment and different cultures.
The author maps the history of design learning throughout different design movements, up to the recent progressive shift into interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary design education, which requires collaboration and communication between design fields. The challenge for European and American institutions still lies in structuring their design programs to cater to their differing students' needs, regional economic systems and government support and emerging trends and design professions.
Illustrations by Alina Günter www.alinaguenter.ch
After a period of consensus regarding how to educate the next generation of designers, design education in Europe and the United States is going through a period of ethical, philosophical, technological, ecological, and cultural challenges. New media and digital technologies, the increasingly global audience, clients, markets, production of design, designs' role in the growing ecological crisis, and, most recently, the progressive shift of the center of design activity toward the emergent economies make the question of how best to educate the future designer an interesting challenge.
Is design education training people with job-ready skills, inducting graduates into professional life or educating students to be citizen designers? While a program of study is usually framed with these three dynamics in mind, the question of the relative importance of each of them is critically important and reflects the educational ethos of a time, an economy, and an institution. The importance of this framing can be seen in the historic shifts of the structure of design learning. The industrial revolution framed learning through the material-based logic of guilds (such as printing, wood, metal, textiles) and the modernist period professionalised the crafts (graphic, product, interior, and fashion design for example). In the late twentieth century the relative emphasis shifted again and design education began to give priority to design's capacity to organise transdisciplinary processes through sustainable design, service design, design management and innovation, and design thinking.
Left: Often the people who teach at a design school are even more important than its educational concept: The Wing Chair by Joa Herrenknecht was created during Stefan Diez's guest professorship at the HfG Karlsruhe. Here it stands in Professor Volker Albus's room.
Right: Tracy Gromek from the Parsons The New School for Design designed the sports equipment FiiWA (Freedom in Interactive Wearable Art) which enables visually impaired people to play in a group. The range includes sensor vests, armbands, goal pad, and this ball, while vibration and sound signals serve as orientation aids.
The environmental consequences of design's role in shaping behaviours, promulgating lifestyles in the imagination, and driving consumption demanded a response. If design could be a force for ecological harm could the same process be reconfigured to ensure beneficial ecological outcomes? This attempt to design for sustainability has brought a previously nascent quality of design into prominence – the organisation of a multi-disciplinary engagement with complex issues and problems, especially those that cannot be 'solved' in a linear sense, only iteratively improved over time and place. Design expertise in this context becomes the ability to edit, organise, and integrate various expert perspectives and their respective data sources. The design process repeatedly visualises and prototypes collaboratively proposed actions and these are taken back to the multi-disciplinary teams in the hope of determining an effective intervention.
The learning mode in schools pursuing this approach is likely to shift away from or modify the modernist Bauhaus notion of 'foundational' skills and toward the pursuit of core qualities inherent to the design process such as the ability to collaborate and communicate, a capacity for empathy, the capability to articulate design insights to those outside the field, and to think and act strategically. These changes are not unique to design education, as there is a growing emphasis across the university, as well as in the commercial world, on interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary modes of learning and practicing. Indeed a number of universities are, or are considering, restructuring to have this approach become the defining logic of the whole institution.
The design schools that are prominent in developing this trans-disciplinary and strategic approach are typically either situated within a university or have substantive collaborative partnerships with 'non-design' institutions. Examples of this in the US include the Illinois Institute of Technology, the 'd-school' (a collaboration between the design consultancy IDEO and Stanford University), the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (Canada), and the newly formed School of Design Strategies within my school, Parsons The New School for Design. In Europe there are The University Institute of the Arts, Helsinki, Goldsmiths in London, the Köln International School of Design, and the Milano Polytechnico. Importantly, the Jan van Eyck Academy and the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands also developed contemporary approaches exploring design's social and political agency.
Recent changes in European Union policy are affecting design education on the 'Continent'. European design pedagogy had been largely based on the 'Werkbund model' of the Bauhaus Academy of Design and the more socially progressively version at the Ulm School of Design, which was an advanced, philosophically framed design apprenticeship. The Bauhaus and Ulm approaches strongly influenced US art and design education where design fundamentals were developed before progressing to be 'masters of form' in one area or another. The faculty was almost always made up of practicing artists and designers imparting their professional expertise to the student body largely unfiltered by bureaucratic controls and expectations.
Unlike Europe, the US government has a very weak role in dictating the overall direction of education. Private colleges and universities are the norm for art and design education, which has developed in relatively 'organic' and erratic ways, as a result. European schools are for the most part government funded and can be directly affected by changing government priorities. The UK, for instance, developed the highly structured and government-mandated Quality Assurance system that resulted both in a leveling of the educational quality between schools and a steadier, more iterative development of the whole design education sector. As a result, the UK design schools have a very strong emphasis on pedagogy and the standardisation of the units of learning that allow for an exchange of credits across the whole educational system. This increased emphasis on pedagogy has also meant a shift toward the career art and design educator providing the institutional framework for programs of study.
Right: Together with Adidas, Susanne Schöpka designed a mountain bike shoe conceived for women. Following completion of her final project, the manufacturer took on the FH München graduate.
Left: Honda study Oree by Offenbach students Niko Albertus and Andre Look.
In 1999, the EU enacted the Bologna agreement that required all member countries to adopt the UK and US systems of Bachelor and Masters degrees. This replaces the four-to-five year Design Diploma. The European Union has decided that the UK modularised system of educational units (courses or credits) transferable across the whole system is essential to its vision of the EU as a global leader in education. Maintaining a healthy diversity of approaches and styles while conforming to the basic requirements of the framework is a dilemma with which many schools still struggle. The legacy in both Europe and the US that the Bachelors degree delivers all that is needed for a professional design career further complicates the model. This results in the 'learning space' being overloaded by specific content at the moment when, arguably, the designer needs to be more broadly educated to manage increased complexity.
The verb, to design, indicates a human capacity: a very broadly inclusive term that includes, but is not defined by, the profession of design. If one accepts this, then it frames an understanding of design that can directly inform the constitution of the academic field of design in the future academy. Design structures our lives, interactions, consumption, democratic and governmental processes, and so on, to such a degree that a basic comprehension of how design 'works' should be required as part of a general education. Carnegie-Mellon University, Goldsmiths University, The New School and North Carolina State University are examples among others of academies that are exploring the potential of this approach institutionally. For this approach to succeed, designers also need to abandon positioning design as a secretive and privileged process in favor of a fluid and porous approach that situates design as the shared practice of societies and cultures with the designer enabling general participation through professional facilitation.
The consensus about what constitutes the fundamentals of a 'good' design education has been largely broken. While design educators can wax evangelical about 'their' model being 'the' model, it is empirically true that, very often, successful designers have not had an education that focused narrowly or exclusively on design, and great designers have emerged from a range of places, life experiences, and educational settings. There is no universal recipe. Institutions have to define and be clear about their place in a larger set of offerings. Increasingly, students have to assess which learning mode and institutional approach best suits them and accept that 'designing' their own education is in and of itself an important education. One student will need strong skill sets from the beginning to develop confidence before being able to move forward while another will be better suited to approach design with a broader liberal arts education and gain a more expansive world-view to understand what they want to do with design. It seems counter-intuitive to our current condition to determine a new consensus on design education between Europe and the US, and the 'design action' may very well be somewhere altogether different – in the emerging economic countries.
This article was originally published in Form magazine, Issue 224, and has been republished with permission.
In the Project Gallery: Message in a bottle, by Monash University students