How should we teach design?

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the way design education should evolve. This is driven by AI encroaching on areas that designers have felt they owned, such as form-giving, but also by perceived pressure on existing educational institutions and models, as well as an oversaturated talent pool and at least a perception of fewer junior-level design jobs. It's a healthy conversation, but it's primarily focused on what we should be teaching. That's a good question; left out of the conversation, though, is how we should be teaching design.

There is a lot of literature on how design should be taught to be most effective. I have observed, in 25 years of teaching, that most of this is largely ignored by instructors, myself included. I think this is because the knowledge is held in places that instructors don't venture: primarily, in scholarly journals that are hidden behind expensive paywalls, and in passages of thick, complex language; try this, for example:

Woof. Academic texts are written in secret code, and I don't think design instructors have time to decipher the code because they are busy teaching. Here, I would like to translate three key parts of this literature to a language that instructors are more comfortable with—one of teaching practice—with two intentions. The first is to help this content find its way into practice. The second is to help focus a conversation about what design education should be.

The scholars talk about designerly ways of knowing

The first big idea that's hiding in scholarly research of design education is offered in the phrase "designerly ways of knowing,” coined by Nigel Cross. He explains that

When a design student is first assigned a project, it's centered around a space of inquiry. Design a toaster for people with arthritis. Design a poster advertising a guest lecture on campus. Design an app to help students find the best price on beer. Each of these (real projects!) tells the student a rough space in which to work. Toasters have toasterness, and arthritis has arthritisness; if you think of those words, you think of all sorts of related other words, too. All of those things are an initial frame.

Research is powerful for a variety of reasons, but one really basic one is that, while a student may instantly conjure up a lot of details about toasterness, an 18 year old may not have very much to activate in the space of arthritisness. Spending time searching for pictures on the internet counts as a way of extending that knowledge. So does asking AI. So does spending time with an arthritic person, watching them make toast. All of these are starting to reframe the situation.

Cross (2006, p39) says:

Making things serves to reframe a problem, too. When a student draws a toaster, they see it emerge as they make it, and that gives them new knowledge to make the next drawing of the toaster. It's happening with every pen stroke, in real-time. It's really hard to understand what's happening, particularly if you happen to be not very good at the pen stroking part. What's more, stopping and thinking about it disrupts it. This is a call for workmanship: for students to become better at manipulating material (which, for better or worse, is largely—in any design discipline—pixels and behavior). Teaching Figma isn't a good use of time. Teaching making things is, and if they happen to be made in Figma, so be it.

This making-reflecting-reframing-making-reflecting-reframing process has to happen a lot, and producing lots and lots of different toaster variations doesn't do it; while we're not interested in teaching students to polish trash, there's something to be said for overworking a sketch or a model in order to see it break. An instructor recently told me that AI has led students to be "too happy too fast," and it's a return to working on one thing for a long time that will help them be frustrated, longer, and happier, later. Even AI does not need to be one-and-done, and if a student is dead-set on typing instead of drawing, then they need to hammer on revising that typed prompt over and over and over. Designerly ways of knowing emerge through real-time engagement with what is known and what is becoming known. It's about form-giving.

Cross (2006, p8) says:

A designerly way of knowing isn't having a method and using it; it's not having a process and following it. It's about continually making things, reacting to them, making purposeful changes, and making more things. And so teaching methods is counterproductive; a method signals that, by completing the method, the work is done. Developing designerly knowledge of a specific problem at a specific time means committing to a method as a way of working, not just completing it once and done. Process doesn't work either, unless the process is one of continual making, reflecting and reframing; a little empathy, a little sketching, and a little prototyping still punts on a lot of work.

In recasting a theory of designerly ways of knowing to a practice of teaching, I would recommend that instructors:

The scholars talk about language and identity

The second large idea presented in scholarly research is about the way language is used in critique. This may surprise you: these academic texts don't discuss how to give or receive a critique (the unfortunate colloquial shit sandwich), but instead, how a student starts to become a designer through the words they use and hear.

Flemming (1998, p42) says:

I appreciate the idea of “accomplishing” design through talk. Take this critique snippet from our toaster project, for example:

Carla is grounding a design decision in data, and standing up a persuasive argument about her decisions. She’s not describing that she likes a larger knob; she’s tying the design choice to a moral stance on consumer fairness. It’s hard to argue with that; it’s a lot harder to argue with than “the size really balances out the juxtaposition of the other visual elements on the control panel.”

When we look at critique as a place for playing with language, the purpose of crit changes. The goal is not to improve the work, or to develop taste. Crit is fundamentally about developing a sense of identity. Students are practicing the type of designer they want to be, based on the types of things they will notice in their work and in the work of others, the justification they will start to engage with in support of the decisions they have made, and the style of self and collaborate advocating they want to embrace.

Flemming (1998, p57) says:

In a sense, the work product becomes a prompt and a sort of conversational map, but is fairly inconsequential in terms of content: if the toaster drawing is good or bad stops mattering. What matters more is how a student describes what they did and why they did it. Similarly, more important than aesthetic or functional criticism is the way other students are led to voice their reactions. These things run counter to "good critique advice" like not talking or defending your work. None of this comes naturally to a student; it all needs to be modeled by the instructor.

Critique becomes improv, and it occurs at two levels. The act of critique is played out, with people saying things, gesturing at things, drawing on things, and responding to things. And simultaneously, the instructor is stopping and narrating what is happening, calling attention to discourse.

Here's the example above, now with the meta-discourse occurring:

The language served to establish Carla as an advocate, as someone who is “on the side” of the people that have to use things we’ve designed. She is claiming to be on a team of fairness, as compared to a team of aesthetics, or a team of functionalism, or a team of sustainability, and so on. Francine is doing the work of making that identity-claiming clear, so other students don’t miss it.

When thinking about design critique as an opportunity for language exploration, it changes the way we structure a critique in class. I would recommend that instructors:

The scholars talk about theorizing

A third large theoretical idea that needs to find its way into teaching practice is theory development itself. In scholarly work, a theory is a suggestive lens through which to examine a problem, and theorizing is the act of developing that theory.

Weick (1989, p516) says:

He quotes Sutherland, in explaining that theory means

It’s probably easiest to understand that by way of an example, and I’ll offer one from Goffman—dramatology. This theory paints the world as a performance, where in all social interactions, there are performers, an audience, props, back-stage, and so on. The theory is a big metaphor for life: we are all acting, all of the time. We can’t “prove” this theory in a traditional sense, but when you look at how people behave, it sure feels right.

Weick (1989, p517) says:

With that definition, theory sounds an awful lot like an underpinning for strategy. It's a surprising, data-based conjecture about why social things are the way they are. If students are able to develop this type of theoretical storytelling alongside of form-giving, they are elevating the thing they made to be an example of a larger point: they are showing that they have made an instance of a whole, and that they are qualified to speak of the whole in an informed way.

Weick (1989, p529) explains that metaphor is one of the main tools of theorists, as they

In a sense, theorizing in design is shouldering your way into discussions of strategy by saying "I didn't just make something awesome; I made something awesome, and it is evidence of something even more awesome that I've been thinking about." For design students, this means learning how to position one thing in the context of a bigger metaphor, a bigger story, a bigger and more powerful structure.

In translating theorizing to a practice of instruction, I would recommend that instructors:

Summary

My guess is that if you are an instructor, you already do some of these things in your classroom. Now, you have some theoretical constructs about why these approaches work. And that's important, because the theories of how to teach can now inform the questions of what to teach.

Design is about reframing, and so we should teach students how to reframe.

Design is about discourse, and so we should teach students how to speak.

Design is about theorizing alongside making, and so we should teach students to develop theories while they make things.

These are pedagogically-centered suggestions that have no commitment to a medium. Each requires craft, iteration, an understanding of materiality, creative confidence, hand skills ("hand" used loosely), and so-on, but they can be done in print, on a screen, with fabric, while carving wood, or with any other material. These skills are some of the things that will get students jobs when all portfolios look the same and when everything "looks great" (read: looks as good as AI can make it—mostly bland, highly glossy, fairly photorealistic). So in addressing a question of what to teach, I don't think the answer is "Figma!" or "Vibe coding!"—I think it's reframing, discourse, and theorizing.

My goal in this text was to emphasize that there exists a lot of timeless literature on how to teach design effectively, and that it's hidden away in texts that are not really intended for instructors to read; to take just a little of that content and start to translate it into something more actionable; and to try to shift the conversation away from "what do we teach in the face of change" towards "how do we teach design, at all, ever."

References and Works Cited

1. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388128
2. Cross, Nigel. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-301-9
3. Fleming, David. “Design Talk: Constructing the Object in Studio Conversations.” Design Issues 14, no. 2 (1998): 41–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511850
4. Weick, Karl E. “Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination.” Academy of Management Review 14, no. 4 (1989): 516–31