Design Education in Crisis: The Transition from Skills to Knowledge

What I read

In this article, the author indicates that industrial design education, at the time of writing, was focused explicitly on skill acquisition rather than knowledge acquisition, and this is problematic.

First, the author provides a short history of the roots of industrial design, beginning with a “confrontation between the Arts and Crafts Movement, with its enchantment for a humanistic quality in everyday objects, and the Industrial Revolution, with its bias towards the mass production of almost anything.” This confrontation was resolved positively, leading to industrial design. Industrial design was then taught in schools like the Bauhaus, and in fine arts programs. Students took a hands-on approach to learning, with a focus on skill acquisition. This educational model was “given the context of both time and culture, an appropriate one,” and the crafts were eliminated.

Industrial progress increased the need for a theoretical basis for industrial design, including knowledge of human factors, materials, and “technology in general.” The use of computers replaced the use of machines. The author points out that industrial design education has not changed to match, and this is the basis of his argument: “schools continue to function in a fine arts environment,” and graduate school is just an extension of undergraduate education. He describes this as a crisis. He also describes that postmodernism is a problem, although does not relate this problem to the earlier crisis.

The author describes that industrial design has knowledge that can be quantified and described, rather than evaluated, but conferences do not focus on this form of knowledge production. Science, however, is a form of description without evaluation, and is a good model for how we should approach the field of industrial design, because “rarely is oxygen referred to as nice or nasty.” The author proposes a new direction that has a “descriptive ideology as its premise,” based on three principles: recognition that industrial design has a body of knowledge, that it will emerge from a science-like exploration, and that this new direction will manifest at different times in the career of a designer.

Finally, the author compares the current state of industrial design, and its relationship with skills, to the split between surgeons and barbers, in the Middle Ages.

What I learned and what I think

This article was published in 1990, in the seventh volume of Design Issues. My largest takeaway is the overwhelming need we seem to have as a profession to reflect on our profession. Do accountants do this? Do lawyers? Is there something just fundamentally different about designers that makes us constantly talk about the crisis of our profession? I probably have contributed to this: I feel like throughout my own profession, I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about what’s wrong with it. I’m doing it right now! (except that this counts more, in the spirit of a PhD…)

The article is all over the place, and maybe that becomes sort of a representation of its own argument. In the short five page article, the author describes that (at the time) schools are overindexing on skills, that design conferences are handing out colorful pamphlets instead of discussing the knowledge of the profession, that grad school is just a two-year extension on the discipline, that post-modernist is “somewhat akin to a child who plays with his or her food at the dinner table,” that design should be like science, and that design education is broken.

If there was a lack of design-based knowledge in the profession in the early 90s, maybe this is all part of the problem and his writing style and content is actually reflective of the agitated discipline. Some of the discourse of the time was about styling, and even though the author goes on to say that we should no longer judge styling but only describe it, he goes to town on a particular aesthetic style. Some of the discourse seems to be about the grounding of skill in the history of craft. Some seems to be about the way designers socialize. And some, at least in his proposal, is the relationship between design and science.

The skill-based conversation is still alive. I just don’t understand how you can teach people the importance of giving form to ideas, and the way to give form to ideas, and the role these ideas play strategically and culturally, without actually giving form to ideas. Any profession focuses on “hand skills,” maybe with the exception of professions that are entirely commodity services or entirely discourse based (like politics); actually, all of these require some form of doing, and the doing leads to the production of knowledge. Scientists do things, they don’t just sit around and talk about them. The knowledge/positivist/science thing was a problem then and is a problem now. And missing here, evident in his quote about gravity, is the fact that these things are considered in context. There is a conversation of oxygen as nice or "nasty" (there’s a word…) in all respects of where it shows up, most obviously in the context of pollution. And scientists do have an agenda, simply because they are human.

He's right on the lack of disciplinary knowledge, though. As I do more annoying reflection of things, at least right now, knowledge seems to live in a few places in design, broadly. One place that design knowledge shows up and emerges is in PhD conversations (“The Mailinglist”), as a discussion of abstract ideas related primarily to the way design shapes negative parts of culture and reinforces human-to-human interactions that many in academia don’t seem to like. Another chunk of knowledge is in methods, which just won’t go away. Another is in process, thin, but still there. Another is in the way creative problems are solved. All of these were “in the air” when the author wrote this, so I’m not sure how or why he missed them. Even the design as science argument was established to some degree, in the context of Simon’s arguments around it.

I keep coming back to the original juxtaposition and angst around skills for making things, and the knowledge of the discipline. The author hedges; after denigrating skills, he comes back to the idea that “the profession must, by definition, have a body of knowledge as well as a set of skills.” Someone needs mastery of material, and mastery over it, to shape it in the way they want. We can argue about what the material is in the world of service or strategy of interaction, that’s fine and is another conversation. But mastery to shape it seems pretty straight-forward to me. On the way to shipping some software, I need to know what pixels to make, how to get the pixels to behave, how to get you to behave, and how to get the organization around it agree to it. There are clear skills in each one of those things, and many of them aren’t actually method-based at all. They are only gained by developing tacit abilities, pattern languages, eye-hand coordination…

Maybe disciplinary knowledge, skill, method, and process are all separate lenses on things, and we’ve over-indexed almost entirely on method in current education. That would sort of explain why when a student, after one year, encounters a capstone project, they have no idea what to do. They have a slight idea of a process, but only in the “I do the double diamond!” style. They have very little knowledge of how design is done, almost no skill, and a ton of methods. So, it makes a lot of sense to throw methods at any problem that pops up. History repeating itself again; maybe, like our fearless methods champions of the 60s and 70s, I’m throwing in the towel there.

Separately, there’s something in here about the externalities of the academy (administrative overhead, a need for more butts in seats, tuition and student expectations, a push on measurable outcomes), and the focus on vocation, which makes it just impossible to actually teach what we need to teach. Bootcamps really did emerge with best intentions, as a rejection (disruption!) of all of this cruft, but got sort of eaten by the love affair with methods and a private-equity-kills-everything focus on growth at the expense of quality.