DDR4 20th March 2004: QUESTION 5

AR (Panel Chair)
Just time for another question before the coffee. Tim Coward of the UWIC, Cardiff, Wales.

Tim Coward. (audience questioner 5) (TC)
My statement was to do with education. It seemed to me that the education of researchers and practitioners and people who are both……starts somewhere, and those of us who have a responsibility for education might be interested in what we supposed to be doing. So the Viewpoint statement is much longer than that, but it leads to the question.

QUESTION 5
We have a responsibility for starting the process of study of research in design, undergraduate design and at postgraduate level.What is the evidence of this being appropriately and successfully addressed within higher education, within taught programmes at postgraduate levels?

AR (Panel Chair)
Right ..I’ll pose that to the academics…

TC
Sorry could I interject. I am not sure it needs to be addressed exclusively to the academics because people who are in what we call design practice get their education somewhere, and those people who employ them, or those who are practitioners within professional design practice might like also to comment.

AR (Panel Chair)
Point taken.

HF
There have been some changes recently in the QAA requirements for research training. I don’t know if everyone is aware of that. It is something that we certainly are having to put into our taught courses at MA level here, and at undergraduate level as well. It is something that all education establishments are going to have to start to take on board.

DD
It is something that is clearly happening at Masters level, up and down the country, but at undergraduate level I am not so sure. I would certainly support very strongly having rather deeper research skills being brought into undergraduate curriculum.

I’ve recently been looking at the way that Denmark have seem to have got itself into something of a fix in its design education, around Denmark’s Design School in particular. Where they are trying to move from what was a Guild Institution with a five year – extensively undergraduate curriculum – very much rooted in crafts to a more theorised experience. And the cohort that is coming through, and is in its first year at the moment, are undergoing a very different kind of experience. It is interesting to see how they are building research methods into the first year, and this may be a very good model for how we could look at these things also.

I think the future for us in practice in industry, is going to be so different, its going to be so much more complex than we are dealing with now. I think that when you look at the trends of the waythat teams are being built with very different kinds of practitioners, different domains now…engaging in the design process, I think it is absolutely essential that our undergraduates have very good grounding in research skills from day one.

AR (Panel Chair)
Frank. Is education providing the profession the kind of people it needs with respect to research skills?

FP
The profession would say no. I think there is a hell of a perception gap between graduates coming out with design qualifications and on what they expect, and on what the employer expects. And bridging that gap is incredibly important. One of the ways in which we might be able to do that is perhaps with less concentration on creativity within undergraduate courses, and perhaps more emphasis on professional practice.

Because what it seems to be about is - the point that was made earlier about - the insular nature of designers. Some say the collective name for designers is ..’an arrogance’ of designers. It is very interesting how they actually relate. It is a very individual thing. And if it could be moved across where they are actually understanding that it is a Professional practice, and then design research has a clear role to play.

If they understand what design research is from an early stage, and they can use it in their career that allows for better outcomes, and also allows for transferable skills, which for as a designer in the very near future is going to be incredibly important, not just outside the design industry but even within the boundaries of design practice.

I would agree with an earlier comment - designers have a very short window before to take this on board. It is gradually becoming … it has not yet achieved the status of - a profession yet, even though we have been working at it for 70 years within the Society, it is still not recognised as a Profession. To try to achieve it as a recognised profession very much depends on taking a professional attitude to it , and taking on board research, taking on board generic skills within the educational process, and having creativity as a role within that, which is a tool, which one knows how to exploit within the process of innovation etc. etc.

I think it needs to be in undergraduate courses. And I think the Society would certainly support that throughout.

MP
I have some difficulties with the idea that we should enhance professional practice with professional studies in our undergraduate programmes, given the fact that are at best 15 to 20 percent of our undergraduate design students are going to end up as professional designers. And in fact, 80 percent are going to be wasting their time with some of the things that are being proposed. And we have to get well beyond the idea that design education is like it was at the end of the 80s and early 90s, where most students would go into the profession – they don’t any longer.

So we have to think of it in those terms, and I think one thing that we can be very proud of in design education – something that has been achieved since the early 90s, is lot of very positive developments in terms of embedding research methods into design programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level. That is something we can be proud of.

When I look around the country as an external examiner. When I go to places like Staffordshire, Dundee, Birmingham etc….. I am not going to name too many names, for I’ll inevitably leave people out. what you see is evidence of some very good committed work in terms of developing an area of research methods, more or less from scratch, over a very short period of time. So actually there is some great work being done throughout the country. That we can be proud of. I think we have to take that further.

What we now need is to encourage those people who created those great courses, modules,…units ..to start producing more as texts, and other teaching resources, that will move us forward more quickly over the next little while.

DO
I am the external examiner at Goldsmiths – on John Wood’s MA course, and I’m just flabbergasted at the quality of personal research that the students do in their theses, in their dissertations. And I agree exactly what you were saying - on the amount of creativity and the way in which they explore things.

One student last year walked through the City of London, and that was her research activity …one paragraph in her research was photographs. Another student did a photograph every five minutes of her day. And that was on the back cover of her thesis.

So I think we have got to be a lot more creative, and I think to give the impression that there is set of techniques out there that you should get to know is also limiting in their education. They should be encouraged to explore. To go really go to the edges of their own curiosity and representations, so they can express the vibrancy of the work, and their commitment to the work they are doing.

So we don’t want a solid body of work - although some people have done this. There is a very good, long, unreadable book at the Royal College of Art that the Helen Hamlyn Centre produced a few years ago on research methods, which is a very good source of material.

But we want everyone to be their very own creative design researcher.

jcj
I am going to begin hear with a memory of Charles Eames was speaking in this room many years ago about design, and I was lucky enough to be in the audience. He said the main difficulty with the designing is the designer. (Audience chuckle). This means that our own ego is not broad enough, and our knowledge is not broad enough, to solve the design problem, except in a narrow way and rather egotistic and err.. annoying way for all the rest of mankind……humankind.

However if there were ever a research Charles Eames, I don’t know who this person might be, he might well come to this room and a similar discussion and say … “the main problem with research is the researcher”. Certainly I feel that, and when I have been supervising design research things. They were not really doing any research. They were going round and round in their ego all the time.

The best thing I could say to them was get out of your study and into transportation for instance, and go on a bus trip; and see what people are contending with, and you very soon forget the initial concepts, which are not the thing you will end up with.

I think the important principal here to do with ‘integration’ is this. I feel in listening to this discussion that there is more integration in each of us than is coming out in this discussion. What is coming out is all sorts of discordant bits and pieces so that some of us may be justified in saying what a waste of time. But within us is the potential for integration more. I think to encourage this is not to aim to get a committee, or a group of people, or one, which has a research skill, and one of which has design skill, and one of which has this that, and the other, but person in the team or the activity to learn both the skills - the scientific skills and the artistic skills, or the design skills. And that is the difficult thing to do.

I don’t think integration can happen between people. I think it can only happen within a single nervous system – cybernetics. Gordon Pask’s successor is nodding his head there, and reminding me that Gordon Pask was also present at that 1962 conference by the way.

So, if designers and researchers are going to do it they need to widen themselves in some way. And that is what the education process is supposed to help them what to do.

But of course beyond this, beyond the pressures of deciding the fate of the world, is everyone deciding the fate of the world. And this is the future of design; not to be done be designers, but to be done by all people using what is presently locked up in our professions in the form of research skills and design skills. But eventually via the internet, and computers, and open access to all kinds of knowledge and skill, this could be, and should be, and will be, I think, spread to everyone and there are many signs that this is already happening.

AR (Panel Chair)
Two quick audience responses, then we’ll go to coffee.

Hans Henlien (audience)
I very much welcome Chris Jones’ comment just now, because what we’ve tended to forget in the design action and the design research community is this very fact that ultimately, according to Arthur North Whitehead , ‘Education is learning for life’; and you can only live life through being a total person.

There was a paper published in the Open University technology texts in the 70s by Donald Schon, which was entitled, I think, ‘From product to process’. The factor we seemed to be ignoring in some of the conversations that have been going on this afternoon, is that we ought to have much greater historical awareness, that we have looked at the process very adequately and I think it was very necessary, and we have picked it apart.

We now have to come back to using the knowledge, and unifying the knowledge, and try and attempt to devise new rules of thumb, rather than use the whole body of knowledge each time a new process problem comes up.

The social history, which is burdening us - of arts on the one side, and history on other - the single subject and the definition by Oxbridge and so on, has been recognised as being very, very treacherous. And George Mallen, with his comments about the research in the cognitive processes still being wide open, does remind me of a paper Chris Able wrote many years ago, and a lot of conversations with him were about this precise problem .

He highlighted, in my view, the future opportunity for the Design Research Society. He was saying, we are obsessed with science on the one hand, art on the other, with rational thinking on the one hand.... The paradigms are in opposition. In fact he then said ‘why don’t we recognise what we do in a unified way?’ What is unique amongst the design fraternity - both researchers and action people?

Surely there is a ‘designerly’ way of thinking - the mental map that creates great works of practical use - fortifications in Roman times, office blocks, schools and so on now. Surely that is the 'designerly way of thinking'.

And I would like really to suggest that this is something that the Design Research Society might at some stage debate. That we should get out of the double bind that keeps us slipping back into history, and we need to have a better understanding of the process, and moving on.

AR (Panel Chair)
Richard over to you.

Professor Richard Buchanan, Host
I was worried we were going to hear the wisdom of the panel, and not hear much from the wisdom of this obviously very experienced audience. But I’ve been very pleased with the balance between the two.

This ends the first phase of our conversation pretty well. I think a lot of ideas have come forward. I am satisfied it is a good balance.

I would like you to take about 20 minutes. Get some coffee. Get recharged Get annoyed ! (Audience laughter) And we’ll finish up with a very good session.

COFFEE BREAK BEGINS

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