in the analog world. How we get students beyond the issues of cultural motifs or symbols and to the humbling work of understanding contexts, values, and behaviors other than their own is the challenge of designing for a global community.

Trend: Demand for a knowledge base that supports new practices Assumptions: Graduate education in design should follow the model of the fine arts and be about refining visual skills and concepts for practice

In 2005 Metropolis magazine polled 1,051 design practitioners, faculty, and students in a variety of design disciplines about their research practices. The article confessed that what respondents think constitutes research ranges from deep investigations of user behavior to picking color swatches. But however these respondents defined the activity, this is some of what they had to say about its role in their work.

• 81 percent of professionals
said they engage in research on
a regular basis in their practices

• 70 percent of professionals said they don’t collaborate with students on research that is important to their business

• 69 percent of university department chairs said research is an integral and required part of their curriculum

• 35 percent fund faculty research through internal university grants

• 22 percent of practitioners don’t share their research with people outside the firm

• 29 percent publish only at conferences

• 17 percent of faculty publish in books

• 4 percent publish online

• 80 percent identified sustainability as content with the highest research priority, but they also ranked systems theory as the lowest priority

What these statistics tell us is that there is little engagement of schools in research that relates to professional practice; there is limited success in gaining external funding; and about half the research done in universities and design offices is never disseminated in archival form and is therefore unavailable to students, scholars, and other practitioners. We have to do a whole lot better if, as in other disciplines, academic research is to shape thinking in the field and move it forward. And as Sharon Poggenpohl ably demonstrated at the AIGA conference in Denver during fall 2007, the U.S. is way behind other countries in developing its design-research culture.

So how do we build a research culture and the discipline of design if graduate-program curricula are based primarily on studio models in fine art? From where will these researchers come and under what standards will their work be evaluated? And how are they prepared to accept research obligations as university faculty?

This is an enormous challenge for the field. It requires not only fine-tuning the missions of graduate programs and criteria for the tenure and promotion of faculty but also greater understanding by employers of what graduate students can bring to the table. It also means we need to reexamine the measures through which we admit undergraduate students and build

their academic competencies for later graduate study. As a field we need to support the growth of doctoral study and efforts to disseminate the growing body of research.

These issues are only the tip of a very large iceberg. There are other traditional assumptions in design education that demand our attention: that all students should be doing the same thing at the same time; that the obligation of students is to execute the faculty brief but never to author their own; that design students don’t read. It is going to take a unified effort to address these and other challenges. At a time when more students elect design for university study than ever before in history, it is easy to congratulate ourselves that we must be doing something right, and I do believe that we provide a very special college experience. I also concur that the artifact and form really matter. But I want to suggest that the next generation of design faculty and design professionals will need to do much more than their predecessors; that we must redesign learning for the twenty-first century.

September + October 2008

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meredith Davis is director of graduate programs in graphic design and head of the Ph.D. in design program at NC State University’s College of Design. She is a fellow, 2005 medalist, and member of the Visionary Design Council of the AIGA and a former member of the accreditation commission of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, for which she has authored a number of briefing papers on design education.

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