Editor’s Note: Meredith’s critique—adapted from her opening keynote address of the 2008 AIGA Massaging Media 2 conference—speaks to design education beyond the boundaries of graphic design. Our thanks to Hugh Dubberly for bringing her speech to our attention.
North Carolina State University College of Design | meredith_davis@ncsu.edu
September + October 2008
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There is an ever-widening gap between where we are going in the practice of design and longstanding assumptions about design education. I’m not talking about the often-heard debates of skills versus concepts, theory versus practice, or professional versus liberal arts education. Instead, this is about the disorienting relationship between the circumstances of 21st-century life and what and how we teach design; about the worldview of professional practice against which we devise the content and pedagogy of professional design curricula.
In the middle of the 20th century, students entered the field of graphic design through technical support. Under an apprenticeship model, they earned the right to create form only after serving time in the mechanical production of more-experienced designers’ ideas. Designers who were successful across a lifetime of form making occasionally gained access to strategic projects at the highest levels of business. They gained preparation for such work on the job.
In the later decades of the 20th century, technology collapsed the preparation of art for print under expert software. Networked communication demanded new skills in building and managing systems that
have less to do with inventive form than with understanding users and technology. And once businessmen like Tom Peters discovered the power of design to differentiate otherwise similar products and services, there was no turning back; the strategic role for design expanded and demanded more expertise than could be gained from running a design office.
Design educator Sharon Poggenphol invokes German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in describing the first model of practice as “know-how.” The second is what Habermas calls “know-that.” Sharon describes this as the distinction between “design as a craft” and “design as a discipline.”
This transformation creates new pressures on design education—among them, higher demands for graduate study and research, loss of territory to other disciplines on campus, and the need for diversifying curricular offerings among schools. At the most fundamental level, however, the problem is that college design curricula and the pedagogies through which we deliver them are based almost exclusively on know-how. They don’t acknowledge issues that drive emerging practices.
The AIGA, in collaboration
with Adobe, formed something
called the Visionary Design Council and charged it with describing the designer of 2015. That council identified the following trends for which there is ample evidence in the year 2008:
• Increasing complexity in the scale of design challenges
• Thinking about the people for whom we design as participants in the design process
• Emergent and remix technologies; designing social interaction
• The importance of understanding community
• The demand for a new knowledge base that supports new practices
This, on the other hand, is a list of longstanding assumptions about how design is to be taught. We inculcate new faculty in these traditions through their own design education and through presentations at conferences and journals. My goal in this discussion is to interrogate these traditional assumptions under the strong light of trends—to examine what we are doing simply by habit may not be the best way to prepare students for 21st-century practice.
• Students learn best through experiences that move from simple to complex
• Individual performance and control of outcomes are among the highest priorities
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