A Jumble of Thoughts and Reflections About Education

I've been somewhat heads-down on things and haven't had a lot of time to document my reflections, so here is a jumble of incomplete thoughts and ideas.

The problem with the rubric

In my recent grading interactions with undergrads, I've observed a pretty unexpected and problematic student-to-system interaction, based on the rubric. I first encountered the idea of a rubric at SCAD in ~2003, when "assessment culture" spread all over teaching. I remember being somewhat alone in my view of this as not entirely bad, because it formalized what has always been an extremely subjective and confusing grading process around creativity. What is an 88% on a studio project? What's a B-? Grades are only useful as an instructional proxy for a thorough description of performance: if they have any value, it's in a "this stands for that" representation of what should be a larger conversation. I remember feeling that rubric-style assessment was a way of capturing that.

But the assessment was around professor-facing assessment of content, not student-facing assessment of performance, and that confused me. We took student projects that were completed, compared them to the rubric, and used that to identify learning outcomes broadly across the department. This was hidden from students and was, in retrospect, really just a cover-your-ass tool for the university when it worked with accrediting bodies.

At Blackboard, the rubric became a big deal as a priority for product management. I recall my team spending an inordinate amount of time building rubric interactions (making one, using one, customizing one, etc) into Learn, and always setting aside concerns of lazy teaching or lazy assessment. I vaguely remember even sidelining the Comments feature for a while (deprioritized on the roadmap) in favor of the ability to quickly click, click, click to grade.

Fast forward to now, and rubrics are pretty much standard in large-size undergraduate classes. I don't know if professors view them as a pedagogical philosophy of fairness or in grading quickly by necessity (how do you grade 100 things in any reasonable amount of time?) but while they may have once been intended to offer visibility into subjectivity, I observed first-hand the exact opposite of this happening. A rubric item exists for grading quality of writing, but contains no reference to grammar. Is grading grammar then Not Okay? A discussion: "Why did I lose points here?"—"Because your work was nearly unintelligible, due to poor grammar"—"But the rubric doesn't say anything about grammar counting." I don't know how an instructor can argue otherwise if the rubric has been established as a block of litigiousness and a claim of fairness. Grammar doesn’t count… what does that even mean?

Of course, the "right" way to assess subjective content is to spend time—a lot of time—with students individually, both as they make the content and as they reflect on what they made; and of course, that doesn't scale. I feel like many systemic, societal problems I'm observing are due to a focus on growth, scale, and size. If I were a student, I would be outraged at sitting in a class of hundreds, but that outrage has nowhere to go. Shit, I did Statistics with four-hundred of my closest friends at CMU. But our design classes had 20 people in them.

So, that's a thing on my mind as I embark on grading 100 assignments.

Purity of method

One of my reasons for going back to school has been to revisit, or in many cases learn for the first time, the "right" way to do the work that I've done over my career. I explicitly learned discount methods of research, synthesis, design, and so-on; my degrees were practitioner and vocational focused, which is and was the appeal. As a 20 year old with a six-figure salary, the ridiculous cost of CMU (even 30 years ago!) was somewhat justifiable. I then taught those same methods to a ton of students and practitioners, and since our corporate training at Modernist and Narrative serendipitously caught the up-tick of design strategy, experience strategy and UXR, an applied view of user-centered research was, and still is, valuable. But, this was at the expense of a real, deep understanding of social-science: why, what, when, how.

That's a part of what came out of Roderic's class, and what is sort of emerging from the qualitative methods class—a purity of ethos around What Is Research, and What Is It For. For me, it's always been an input into synthesis as an input into strategy. Here, it's Theorizing. What is happening, and why is it happening, and to whom is it happening, and by whom is it happening? In the same way that Contextual Inquiry is Ethnography Light, Synthesis for Strategy is Theorizing Light. One learns both in academia. The output of the pure version is meaningful knowledge and understanding. The output of the light version is useful input into making things. I don't know of many jobs that emerge from the first one (although there aren't really any jobs for the second one now, either, so....) Academia shouldn't be only about job-getting, but if it's $70k a year, it can't NOT be about vocation.

A bunch of words on design

I wrote some things about design that I just want to put somewhere, for later.

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While the roots of design were social and political in nature, and a variety of scholarly considerations have painted design as a discipline, a rhetorical device, and a liberal art, it's generally accepted that modern design exists within and for corporations. One of the many ways that design differentiates itself from art is the scale of which designed things come to life in the world around us, and that scale is afforded primarily through economic mechanisms. Industrial design and graphic design and fashion design objects are "mass produced"—that is, a design is made over and over and over, amplifying the results of the process of design. This amplification is only made possible by changes in production: the ability to bring materials to the right place at the right time, combine them with a "designerly vision", pop out the objects of design, and distribute them to whomever it is that wants them.

Digital design operates "at scale" as well, and from an economic perspective, it is generally (but incorrectly) considered more cost effective, because producing digital apps and websites has no obvious physical footprint: one need not source steel or ship things in containers across the ocean to bring a design to people in mass.

Design at scale has been rightfully criticized for all sorts of reasons. When objects are made in bulk, costs typically drop, and with less invested in a purchase, objects become disposable. Sending things here and there carries environmental impacts. Working conditions in factories are terrible. Labor is viewed as disposable. Objects of desire lead to a clear delineation of those who can buy them and those who can't.

Digital artifacts at scale come laden with similar baggage: cost of power, demands for physical devices, and a culture of distraction.

But to criticize design as corporate, and corporate as bad, may be academically valuable, but is practically irrelevant. These forces are not going to disappear without a large-scale disaster, and while many critics feel that we are headed precisely for such an event, we are largely stuck, until it happens, with a society that has made some questionable decisions. Designers are complicit, but so too are all corporate professions.

It is worth questioning, however, where the designers who are complicit are coming from, because while the context of design as a problem is well entrenched, the source of participant labor may not be; that is, a student is learning, and what they are learning comes from somewhere, and it can be changed. Both pedagogy and curriculum does change, usually slowly but sometimes very quickly, as evidenced by COVID (of course, not necessarily for the better). If we decide that design at scale is problematic, we may not be able to change the machine that makes it, but we may be able to change the labor that provides it.

So, a focus on design education: the place where designers learn. What do they learn? What could they learn?

They might learn to be a designer, or they might learn to get a design job. The two are not the same, although they are also not at odds with one another, and they are also not mutually exclusive. But an outcome of getting a design job appears to be well understood, well developed, well respected and well expected, while an outcome of being a designer is not any of those things. Arguably it once was those things, at least to reflect on the lore of Bauhaus education, but that designer and today's designer are clearly not the same thing.

This is a question of "what is a designer", and my answer is that "a designer is someone with creative confidence, a temperament and language of criticality, and craft in making things." This does not separate design from art or design from science or design from anything else, and the question of what is a designer is not the same as the question of what is design (or what is the discipline of design, or who gets to call themselves a designer, or what does a designer do.) This is an assertion of the qualities of a designer that we should be fostering in education. And in a curriculum with a fixed duration, which is how nearly all schools operate, these are the qualities we should be fostering at the expense of other qualities.

More precisely: we should first teach students of design to have creative confidence, to develop a language and a temperament of criticality, and to build a craft in making things, and we should only teach them other things with time remaining, which is probably not much.

When people read assertions about what we should and shouldn't do, it's reasonable to work to remove any dissonance, and in this case, that means, at least comparing "these are the things I teach" to "these are the things that fit into those categories" and the working to resolve any conflict. We need more details to resolve this dissonance, though, and so here is what is meant by each of those three claims.

Creative confidence means teaching students to embrace, rather than shy away from, a process of making things. However creativity is framed—coming up with new ideas, making something of nothing, refining existing things, making something beautiful—a confidence in creativity demands a stance of wanting to do the creative thing, and then doing it. The reference to framing of creativity implies that a student has a perspective on what it means to create, and that perspective can be informed.

A vocabulary and temperament of criticality means that students are able to see how things are, and how they might be, and communicate that seeing to other people. A temperament is, like confidence, partially a stance: a view that things can be critiqued, and that a student has the right to form and offer an opinion on the world around them. A temperament also indicates a refinement of that stance, in that a response is tempered to a situation. Critique is not arbitrary. A vocabulary of criticality shapes and then communicates the specificity of the criticism. It provides substantiation for opinion. The language need not be spoken, although that vocabulary is one of the most important to learn. It simply needs to communicate.

A craft in making things is the ability to realize the outcome of both creative confidence and vocabulary and temperament of criticality. The exercise of design is not hypothetical, and being confident and critical has no designerly value without form. Craft is refinement, workmanship: that material and form is developed appropriate to problem and solution. Making things is creation, of bringing ideas to reality.

These are the things we should teach design students, if we want them to learn to be designers.

Also, maybe for another time

• The IRB is pissing me off. I clicked the Wrong Submit Button in the homegrown software, and my proposal sat around for three weeks because it wasn't in a review queue. Why are there two submit buttons? Why is the submit button a link and not a button?
• I don't think I should have taken classes. I should have built independent studies around the content. Live and learn.
• The recent article Stop Meeting Students Where They Are is more and more meaningful. The findings from my faculty research extend way past design. It's a systemic problem.