Interactions - November/December 2014

Jon Kolko,

Austin Center for Design

at-risk populations can inform the process used to work with those populations. How do you engage with a population that can’t give informed consent? What does it mean to drive a participatory design process, as compared with a top-down, more command-and-control process?

What steps should a designer take to translate their findings into actionable insights? Theory holds the answers to these process questions, and for a student of design, it presents an evolving body of knowledge that they can lean on as they develop their own methodology for engaging with large-scale problems.

• Theory gives students the
ability to think beyond a single
design problem, in order to develop
higher-order organizing principles.

Each design problem is unique. After encountering a number of design problems, designers start to realize that there are patterns to both problems and solutions. Identifying these patterns takes time and comes with experience. Theory gives a designer a structure in which to organize these experiences—a way of thinking about their sameness and differentness. It becomes an intellectual taxonomy and a way of organizing different types of design solutions.

After years of working as a
consultant, I’ve built up a portfolio
of work in telecom, consumer goods,
entertainment, enterprise software,
and so on. That’s not a very useful
way to categorize my work, though,
because it doesn’t give me a way to
draw insight from the work and apply
it on future projects. Instead, I try
to think about how my work relates
to theoretical constructs. Some
of my work is related to complex
problem solving, leveraging the work
I end up agonizing over every detail,
every class.

Our curriculum at Austin Center for Design is rich with design theory.

Students take theory classes that focus on the social and political relationships between design and the culture of society. Students learn theory and discourse related to designing for the public sector, specifically as it relates to ill-defined problem solving and the ethical obligations of designers. They read complex articles from computer scientists, psychologists, and sociologists, and they build arguments that synthesize these articles into new ideas.

Yet the program at Austin Center for Design is a practitioner program, and these students go on to be practicing designers, not academics. They work for big brands, for consultancies, and in startups—and increasingly, they start their own entrepreneurial endeavors.

They aren’t pursuing a Ph.D. path, so why teach theory? Why waste precious class time on academic discourse, rather than practical skills?

I’ve thought a lot about what makes a great designer. One of the qualities is craft and immediacy with material.

That’s sort of obvious—someone who makes things needs to be good at making things. I’m convinced that theory is also a key ingredient to greatness, a key part of claiming to be a competent, professional designer, but it’s less obvious than methods or skills and is often ignored during design education. There are at least three reasons I think students need to learn theory as part of their foundational design education.

• Theory gives students the
basis for a “process opinion.”

A huge amount of design work is
subjective. Design research—applied
ethnography—gives designers the
basis to form a specific opinion in
the context of a design problem;
it’s deliberate and is often used to
substantiate a design decision. But
theory gives a designer the basis
to have an informed governing
philosophy, broad or more ambient,
for the process they’ll use to do their
work. For example, design research
might indicate that homeless people
in Texas have different shelter
requirements than homeless people
in Detroit; it can offer specific
details about those contexts and
people, and can then be used to
substantiate design decisions. Theory
about the ethics of designing with
Why I Teach Theory