Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion

What I read

In this article, the author discusses the way Bauhaus education has contributed to a view that design is made up of art, technology, and science, and that we need a reconsideration of design education, more focused on the way design engages within a system, rather than contributing to the system from outside of it.

The author begins by describing that when this was written (in 2001), design was in a paradigm shift. He indicates the reason for this includes a focus on product engineering and marketing, and that “one is bound to conclude that the reasons for the current situation in design are to be found mainly outside of the field of design. This explains the very wide—and, to some extent quite ambitious and pretentious—scope of this essay.” He explains that this shift is due to a number of elements, including a focus on economics as a judge of success, a limited view of customer as user, an overemphasis on aesthetics and materiality, and ethics based on business contracts. He describes that he will “try to contribute to the following three problems”, which include the basis for theory in design education, parameters of doing in design, and ethics.

He then provides a select history of Bauhaus education. Form and function is a well-known part of the Bauhaus ethos, but was not the goal of Gropius’ Bauhaus pedagogy, as it missed on the scientific nature of study. The New Bauhaus placed increasing emphasis on the positivist perspective of design, and further models based on Bauhaus education increased their claimed focus and dependence on science and objectivity, and a minimization of art and form-giving. “Contributions from the human and social sciences” were included, but the “underlying dualistic epistemological structure remained the same.” The author draws the conclusion that the Bauhaus tradition was based on art, science and technology, and presents a visual showing proportions of how those can show up. He explains that “Today, everybody tends to agree upon the necessity of including art, science, and technology in a design curriculum.”

Next, the author discusses two major approaches to design, one focused on applied art and another on applied science, and both “must be considered as outdated today.” Again, the author points to Bauhaus education as a root of applied art, using Klee’s color theory course as an example. He describes that applied science shows up in how design students are taught to frame a problem, as a correct framing leads directly to a solution. This is further evidenced in the distinction between a science of the natural and of the artificial, and Simon is cited as having “clearly claimed the originality of design thinking.” This introduces technology into a scientific sequence, and shifts the focus from solving a problem to transforming from one state to another; but designers “cannot act upon a system, only within a system.” A transformed state is “never a solution,” which is considered a positive thing.

Returning to the Bauhaus, the author describes that Gropius questioned the idea of a science of design, and proposed that visual perception, and therefore visual intelligence, was the grounding of an objective view of design. He additionally described that designers can see everything in relationship, perhaps indicating that the visual intelligence is the ability to “see” metaphorically. Future design education should be based on anthropology, richer than just ergonomics and consumer psychology, and “future visual intelligence must be capable of penetrating into the invisible world of human consciousness and into the intricate ecologies of the outer world.” A model from Hickling is briefly mentioned.

Next, the author describes the need to include a conversation of ethics in design education, including a view of the responsibility of design. Design should shift to acting rather than making, and therefore “not making” is still “acting.” This leads to “the vanishing of the product as the main target of design.”

Finally, the author summarizes the purpose of his argument, to “lay some foundations for a renewal of design education and research.” This foundation is still based on the components of art, science and technology, but to determine the contents or shape of those components, design needs to “establish an epistemological/methodological model for the design process or project,” which is inspired by “systems science, complexity theory, and practical philosophy” and based on a logical of aesthetics. The skills of design should be taught in parallel with studio work and continually through education, rather than as grounding or foundations at the beginning; this leads to “spiritual exercises” across the program of learning.

What I learned and what I think

The argument that is here is, as far as I can absorb: Bauhaus education set a structure for design framed by a relationship of Art, Science, and Technology. Various flavors of this have been considered in subsequent Bauhaus-inspired programs, but with different areas of emphasis. Current design education fires too hot on an implied form of science, where a project brief is said to lead logically to a project solution, and brings with it all the problems of a positivist view of the world. We need to recast this model to be more informed by the complexities and connections of the world we live in, which is not “observable” for a designer, because they exist within it. Ethics will play a large role in this recasting, as will “spiritual exercises.”

I don’t think there’s any contention or confusion around the focus of Bauhaus on a view of the arts and crafts movement embedded in the context of both science and technology. It was pretty clear that the pedagogy was around craft-based education, and the ethos of creating something “perfect” based on the relationship of utility and aesthetics. I’ve always thought of Bauhaus also as a champion of practicality, which might fall loosely under “technology,” although I would view it more through a humanistic lens that includes things like “affordability.” Maybe that’s a naïve take on it; most of Bauhaus formalization is pretty clear.

There’s a big jump here from Ulm in the 60s to the late 80s and it’s unclear what exactly the author was responding to that prompted him to write this. He leads with:

“Even the most cursory look at recent literature and production in design would be sufficient to reach the conclusion that the general landscape is safe, quiet, and serene. It is, therefore, not really original to claim that we are in a period of necessary change, be it in design education, practice, or research… one is bound to conclude that the reasons for the current situation in design are to be found mainly outside of the field of design.”

But if things are safe, quiet, and serene, then what was the point? I don’t think I mean that in a rude way, more in a practical way to try to understand better why a new educational approach was necessary. The later reference to the role of the design brief and the implied solution sort of fills in the gap, but it wasn’t clear to me how a design brief directly explains the solution. There’s a connection here to Simon, but I can’t actually tell if the new educational paradigm he’s proposing embraces bounded rationality and a science of design, or rejects it. I’m also unsure, then, why his new model of design (at least as I understand it) still has the same Bauhaus “containers” of art, science, and technology, rather than removing or adding. Ethics seems important in this argument, and I would have expected that then to be at least a formal part of the mode and maybe even the container on the whole model itself. And I’m unclear why science is still included in the discussion, if a major part of his argument (again, as I understand it) is that the positivist approach to design as a science is a really bad idea.

I’ll run with the foundational model for a moment, as it applies to what I see right now. In the best case of a four-year industrial design program, I see technology, used narrowly, show up in a really pragmatic way of thinking about how things are made. Students are still learning CAD, still learning about production mechanisms, still learning about material. I don’t know how hard science is showing up, if at all; I’m not sure students even take basic courses in how the body works. Social sciences are applied, in the style of loose ethnography. Art is definitely showing up in the context of foundation studies and then development of form. In many programs, there are no humanities integrated into the conversation, maybe with the exception of a discussion of sustainability ethics. I think many programs have included projects that, at least in part, engage with a local community, so we can put some form of design-with and civics (…..) in there. I guess I would update the model to make science just a tiny dot on the paper and add humanities, and entirely separate the social sciences into their own little bubble. That’s a pretty different view than the original Bauhaus model, at least as shown here. I think there’s a mismatch between that revised model and the needs of industry, and maybe it’s useful to overlay those models on one-another.

And there’s a question in here, too, about the point of education, at least now. Is the point of design education to train people to be great designers, or to get them jobs? What if the two are at odds?

An aside. I have a hypothesis about why some of these older papers (and this isn’t even that old—it’s from 2001—but the point is the same) are so thick and convoluted, and the arguments so twisted, because they were finalized produced on a typewriter, or on a basic word processor with which the author wasn’t yet confident. As a result, editing probably happened slowly and infrequently, and the evolution of an argument was less constant, less “held in the head at once,” and less iterative. There’s a structure of an argument here, for sure, but I can imagine it would communicate so much more effectively if the author had worked it more thoroughly, over a longer period of time.