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
Theory gives designers
a structure in which
to organize their
experiences—a way
of thinking about
their sameness and
differentness.
INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG 22 INTERACTIONS NOVEMBER–DECEMBER2014
COLUMN BODONI, BAND-SAWS, AND BEER