Meredith Davis contributed her reflections as part of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 update. In her essay Meredith notes where design education fails to engage with real-world complexity and does not keep pace with a shift from fixed deliverables to dynamic experiences.

The updated Icograda Design Education Manifesto and supporting essays - including this one - is available for download [PDF - 10.77 MB]. To obtain a printed copy of the book for a nominal fee, please contact the .

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My greatest concern for the future of graphic design education is the ever-widening gap between what is taught in college and university programmes and the global context in which it is practised. This is not to say that there are no design programmes that demonstrate foresight by addressing the shifting landscape of design practice, only that the vast majority of design curricula promote a 20th century vision of the field that is increasingly irrelevant for contemporary issues and scholarship demands.

While this essay is too short to address the breadth and depth of these defining concepts, one theme seems pervasive: complexity. The position of design within expanding technological, cultural, social, physical and economic systems defies simplification. Complexity is an essential characteristic of our present context and it has serious implications for what and how we teach.

Complex systems are inherently unstable and constantly transforming - the relationships of their constituent parts and their interactions with other systems are always in flux. The principles that undergird current design education are inadequate tools for coping with this constant change. Thus, the challenge for design educators is to develop curricula that are both agile and expandable.

Traditionally, graphic designers thought of systems as something that they made - sets of visual elements deployed according to rules for their combination. More recently, technology recast systems as the interacting functions of discrete tools and their operations. Marketing and human factors disciplines expanded this to include the preferences and behaviours of 'users' who interact with and through technology. Today's environment, however, challenges us to think about the context of design in a more involved, intricate manner. Users are entire ecologies of people - not simply consumers seeking goods or deploying functions.

Their settings reach beyond physical surroundings or economic imperatives and they require services that extend further than a series of procedural actions or one-time encounters. The interactions between these components are multi-dimensional and dynamic, and the rate of change in their relationships is accelerating. We design in environments of complex, interdependent relations where every action has many consequences.

Despite this shift, however, most undergraduate programmes focus on the design of de-contextualised objects and a process with the goal of fixed, 'almost perfect' results. Mastery of an abstract visual language precedes investigations of context, as if formal logic can be imposed on any problem and the intent of design is to simplify rather than manage complexity. In cases where methods must be applied to existing settings, problem statements are often defined by the faculty rather than by the students, and are rid of complexity and contradiction.

The challenge for contemporary design programmes is to set aside longstanding assumptions about how design should be taught and to transform both the content and structure of education to meet the demands of contemporary communication.

The Knowledgeworks Foundation and Institute for the Future have forecasted important factors of change for education in the 21st century.⁰¹ These trends have significant implications for design's role in shaping education and for professional design's pedagogical practices. The forecast includes:

Amplified organisation:
Extended human capacity to remake the organisation

This trend addresses the emergence of social networks and technologies for cooperation. Citizens live, work and collaborate across media and social platforms, they self-organise and open their activities to public critique and continual reconfiguration. The trend calls into question, not only how design teaching and learning are managed, but also how programmes communicate the place of design in the decision-making structures of organisations. In the last decade of the 20th century, strategists argued for design at the highest levels of business - a top-down decision-making process. Today, it is clear that good ideas also rise from within the ranks and that structures must act upon challenges to established conventions. The past offers few examples of this kind of work and typical design education assumes an expert-driven environment. Our task as design educators, therefore, is to transform our processes and what we perceive as the relationships among clients, user audiences and designers.

Platforms for resilience:
Creating flexibility and resilience among system failures

This trend acknowledges the instability and uncertainty of today's world and warns that methods that resist change will not succeed. The authors of the forecast call for lightweight, modular educational infrastructures that can support the wellbeing of learners and learning agents.⁰² In recent decades, design schools have added content to full programmes of study in a curriculum-by-accrual attempt to respond to new practices and technologies. Unwilling to sacrifice previously valued concepts, skills and curricular structures, the organisational logic of these curricula became less apparent and infrastructures failed under the burden of having too much to teach in too little time. The fixed expertise of faculty members in a constantly changing field where new knowledge and skills are required and the growing diversity of learning expectations for college students illuminate hindrances in older curricula. There are structural barriers to the interdisciplinary work that is demanded by complex problems. Thus, design educators must develop flexible curricular structures that can respond quickly to changing times.

New civic discourse:
Rearticulating identity and community in a global society

This trend considers 'educitizens' an increasingly dispersed group of learners who engage in public discourse about the criteria for education. The audience for non-professional design education is growing as there is a greater demand for interpretation of information, technology in learning and innovation in all fields. Equally pressing are the expectations of professional design students who see opportunities for design practice in a global economy. Once educated to work for clients in the top 10% of the economic market, design students now find opportunities in areas where innovation can shape the quality of life. How schools respond to student demand for meaningful work will shape the social character of design education, as well as its curricular logic.

The maker economy:
Personal fabrication and open source principles democratise production and design

This trend calls for bottom-up networking and the downscaling of design and production to the local level. The forecast claims that "schools, community centres, and businesses will become important hubs of design knowledge, rapid prototyping, and problem-solving skills."⁰³ The question for college-level design educators, therefore, is how pedagogy moves from discrete artifacts designed through expert-driven processes to participatory tools and adaptive/adaptable systems through which others construct their own experiences. This shift in control from designing for people to designing with people and by people requires new methods. Further, it challenges us to consider what role college and university design programmes will play in shaping the nature and services of these collaborations.

Pattern recognition:
An extremely visible world requires new sensemaking

This trend addresses the public's need to discern patterns in overwhelming amounts of information. GPS in mobile devices, sensors embedded in the environment and the "digital trails" of social networking provide a "'picture' of our lives as citizens, workers, and learners."⁰⁴ The work for design education is to determine what kinds of visual representation are useful for diverse populations and how to deliver such content when interfaces call for a broader range of sensory input and data manipulation than visuals can provide. The principles of form are no longer solely for representational purposes, they are information reconfigured as behaviour.

These trends did not emerge overnight, their arcs are long and there will be no returning to more familiar ground. As graphic design yields territory to other fields, it becomes clear that now is the time to reinvent the discipline and to argue for the new value that design can bring to living, working and learning in a complex world. The history of design shows that such moments are rare - it is important to seize this opportunity.

Footnotes

1. 2010. Knowledgeworks Foundation 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning, futureofed.org [9 December 2010]
2. Ibid. 1
3. Ibid. 1
4. Ibid. 1

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Keywords

• Civic discourse Complexity
• Maker economy Resilience
• Sensemaking
• Services
• Settings
• Social networks Systems

About Meredith Davis (Raleigh 35˚49'8"N 78˚38'41"W, United States)

Meredith Davis held the position of Department Head in Graphic Design and Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Design program and holds graduate degrees from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Pennsylvania State University. Meredith is 2005 national AIGA medalist, a former AIGA board member, and former president of the American Center for Design and the Graphic Design Education Association. Meredith is an author and lecturer and serves on the editorial board for Design Issues and is currently authoring a college textbook series on design for Thames and Hudson, Ltd.

From the Manifesto update committee co-chairs

Icograda President Elect 2011-2013, project leader and co-chair for the Icograda Design Education Manifesto Omar Vulpinari has assembled 'An essential chronology of the Design Education Manifesto 2011' with details of the timeline and key contributors to the update project.
Read the chronology

Audrey G. Bennett was asked to summarise the experience of co-chairing the 2011 Icograda Design Education Manifesto. She suggested the one word she would choose is change. The disciplinary and social upheaval of the past decade warranted an updating of the 2000 manifesto, and the new manifesto promises transformation. The word change also illuminates the precise aim of a manifesto - to engender agency in the reader.
Read her full response

About the Manifesto

The 2009-2011 Icograda Executive Board resolved to mark the 10 anniversary with an update of the Manifesto. This update was intended to help steer design curriculum and equip faculty and students to handle current and future issues in design education. Its form and content addressed the participatory, social nature of academic exchange in today's online community, shaped by technological advances.
icograda.org/education/manifesto

For inquiries about obtaining a printed copy of the book for a nominal fee, please contact:

Diala Lada
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