The Perennial and the Particular Challenges of Design Education

ABSTRACT Education in design shares with other disciplines a number of perennial challenges, including the need to transfer human culture, the choice of what parts of human culture to transfer and the decision as to what approaches work best in accomplishing that transfer. Design education also faces particular challenges, which are shared with only a few other disciplines. These are a predisposition towards the future, the increasing necessity of interdisciplinary approaches and the value for students in participating early in the culture of research. I argue for curricular advancements to accommodate each of these factors, including in particular a design PhD modeled on the humanities. Finally, I emphasize the importance of providing students with sufficient time to reflect. EDUCATION HAS A SET OF CHALLENGES THAT ARE PERENNIAL First is the need for transfer of training, experience, knowledge and insight. Let's refer to these things collectively as the cultural archive. The existence of that archive and its means of transmission is at the center of human culture. The transfer is often associated with youth and age, although it isn't necessarily connected in that way, and with the exponential growth of change, it is increasingly not. What this means for the future of design education is that we can expect the trend to continue where it often happens that students know more about the current environment and immediate future than their instructors know. If our model is education as transmission, we limit the possibilities for combining the various kinds of knowledge available around the table for the best educational advantage. Alternatively, if we accept the concept of knowledge as co-creation in an environment that has been properly scaffolded to support learning, we have opportunities to bring together the best that all participants can contribute for their mutual advantage. Which leads to the second perennial challenge - determining the extent to which the training, experience, knowledge and insights of one generation or one group of people are relevant to another group. It is often the case that what we have learned is no longer relevant and may even be incorrect. Much of it is culturally bound, with different cultures privileging different parts of the archive, and in addition, culture changes. Further, a significant portion of what we have learned, especially through experience, is essentially an accumulation of mistakes that we would avoid making again, rather than an accumulation of good strategies that we would leverage for future benefit. As William Saryon's Armenian uncle (Saryon, 1940) so eloquently puts it: "It is no harm. Pay no attention to it." Yet anything that has consumed our time tends to attract our attachment, so that we feel the necessity of proving that our time was not wasted, by believing that some of that time was well spent in learning valuable lessons. And in order to support the belief that the lessons were valuable, we seek to pass them on to someone else. In essence, we find ourselves in this quandary: "I have spent a lot of time learning things and they are no longer relevant. Now I am in the role of a teacher." This sequence of causes and effects, coupled with belief in the transmission model of education, is a significant part of the desire to use obsolete technologies in the classroom. Third, given the premise that at least some of our cultural archive is worth transmitting, there is the vexed question of what approaches to teaching and learning actually work. To what extent is it possible, in fact, to teach, or is it best to think that the primary possibility rests with the capacity of the student to learn? A corollary here is how best to determine whether or not someone is ready to learn, or we may say is at a teachable moment. We have tended to solve this by making learning expensive and hard to get, so that people self-select. …