Hasta La Ideas

News: universities “aren’t interested in the type of education that is needed for creatives,” says Neil Austin, head of the UK’s leading furniture design course, which is being closed down.

Bucks New University in High Wycombe, northwest of London, announced last month it will cease recruitment for its renowned undergraduate programmes in furniture design and there will be no new intake for September 2014.

“This isn’t just about getting rid of furniture courses, it’s about making a statement that creativity isn’t welcome within a university environment,” Austin told Dezeen.

“If Bucks goes down, it’s a big signal that universities themselves aren’t interested in the type of education that is needed for creatives,” he continued. “This is beyond furniture, this is about creative courses.”

He believes the main problem is that the space and resources needed to teach subjects like design make them less financially attractive for universities than more academic subjects.

“Creative courses are a little bit messy and a little bit big – they need workshops, they need facilities and they need space to play,” he explained. “Universities like sticking 100 students in a lecture theatre with one lecturer for an hour, two or three times a week. That’s the business plan.”

Rather than simply abandon courses that don’t fit the neat business model universities have been forced to adopt, he suggests that academic institutions should balance the more lucrative courses against those that are more expensive to run in order to continue equipping graduates with skills required by industry, in particular the creative sector.

“Any good university has got to get the balance right between making the income and supporting courses that foster skills and intellectual pursuits which are needed in the country,” he said. “If some of those other courses with one lecturer and 100 students are able to support the courses that make less money, then so be it.”

Bucks New University cites the high costs of running the courses and declining numbers of applications as reasons for the decision.

“Competition for students has increased significantly in recent years and it has become necessary for universities to make changes in order to remain financially sustainable,” said a statement from the university. “Our evaluation of courses took into consideration amongst other things the operational costs and investment required in delivering the programmes as well as declining student number trends over time.”

Austin blames student numbers on a lack of targeted marketing. “Marketing at Bucks has no budget within the university – it’s very poorly funded,” he said. “But the bigger problem is that the people who do the marketing truly have no idea what the essence of advertising a creative course is about and so we’re not reaching the right people. We get bundled in with the generic marketing programme that has absolutely no results for us.”

Students, tutors and alumni are campaigning to keep BA furniture design courses at the university. Though the decision is unlikely to be reversed, by keeping discussion about furniture at Bucks open they hope it will be possible to create new undergraduate options in the future, to complement MA courses that are not affected.

“There is no doubt that since this announcement there is huge support outside the university for Furniture at Bucks, which is really heartening,” said head of department Lynn Jones on the campaign’s Facebook page. “Endorsements like these on Facebook give us a great marketing opportunity,” she added. “I hope that in time we can turn this support into positive proposals for any potential future growth and new courses.”

The BA Furniture course itself has only been running for two years, having formed from the merging of BA Contemporary Furniture and Product Design with BA Furniture Design and Craftsmanship. All current students will be allowed to complete their degrees but there are fears they could be affected by immediate cuts in staff and workspace.

The university is also closing BA Furniture Restoration, Conservation and Decorative Arts, BA 3D Contemporary Crafts and Products, and BA Fine Art, plus five engineering degrees.

Bucks is just one of many UK design schools under pressure from funding cuts, dwindling applicant numbers and increasing costs. Though record numbers of overseas students have applied to study architecture and design courses in the UK this year, the number of UK students seeking places on domestic architecture and design courses has been falling steadily since 2010.

Though MA courses in the country continue to thrive, closure of the UK’s undergraduate courses fuels concerns raised last year that postgraduate institutions like the Royal College of Art could become “a Chinese finishing school”, with intake limited to those who have already completed undergraduate education overseas.

However, recent changes to immigration law have fuelled concerns from prominent figures in the industry, who predict that visa restrictions could put off overseas talent as well.

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Opinion: the internet is about to disrupt education and kill the lecture, which brings together “bored lecturers with hungover students”. But, asks Dan Hill, would design students be better off learning in the “gloriously generative cyberpunk favelas” of current institutions?

“‘Because,’ said Morris Zapp, reluctantly following, ‘information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it’s no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine.'” (From “Small World”, by David Lodge, 1984)

So says Morris Zapp, the errant American academic in David Lodge’s novel “Small World”, the meat in the sandwich of Lodge’s campus trilogy. Written three decades ago, “Small World” revels in the campus politics, sexual politics and, well, plain old politics of the time. But in this tirade from the reliably forthright Zapp (think Walter Matthau) we hear a kind of pre-echo of an increasingly vocal meme about educational tech.

We might need a bit more perspective – apologies, Morris – in order to understand what might be going on in design and architecture education, and by extension design and architecture, over the next few years.

For Morris Zapp we can now read Sebastian Thrun. Unlike Zapp, Thrun is real; via Stanford and Google X (the lab that created Google Glass and their self-driving cars) Thrun now runs Udacity, one of several start-ups looking to “radically disrupt” education. (Radical disruption is the obligatory starting point these days.)

These start-ups develop and host MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. In simple terms, they are putting videos of lectures online, within a flexible course structure, adorned with a few loose-fitting social media tropes to enable student discussion and automated in-lecture prompts and quizzes. People sign up to take courses at their own pace, more or less, over the internet.

But those simple terms don’t suggest the impact that MOOCs could have on traditional higher education, including design education. Udacity is joined by Coursera (also ex-Stanford), Khan Academy, edX (MIT/Harvard) and many others. They claim millions of users; already more than attend traditional universities in the USA, in fact. (Coursera alone has over four million enrolled on courses.) Bill Gates has called Khan Academy the future of education. Thrun believes that within 50 years there will only be 10 institutions in the world providing higher education (he hopes including Udacity).

(Ah these names. “Coursera.” “Udacity.” They sound like recently-privatised former state assets. I next expect a slew of social media oriented services, with monickers like Smugly and Learnr, Swotly and Examinr, Cramly and Testr.)

Yet what MOOCs essentially do is replace the lowest of the low-hanging-fruits of education – the common or garden lecture. It represents what we call the “jug and mug” approach to learning: the lecturer is the jug, pouring their knowledge into the mug, aka the student. In fact, we know that most lectures bring together bored lecturers with hungover students. (Or indeed vice versa.) You don’t need to watch a Ken Robinson lecture – although you should – to know that this is not what education should be about.

Yet so many education systems are still oriented around the lecture. It is the foundation of timetables, and the lecture theatre still represents the foundations of most contemporary college buildings, spatially. One is probably being constructed right now, somewhere in the world, as you read this.

And that’s a waste, as MOOCs may do lectures much better. This is the component of higher education that the internet will easily swallow. MOOCs are the mp3 of education: the easiest thing to distribute, will be. Just as the mp3 has indeed disrupted the music industry, but not really music, so the MOOCs will remove much of the lecture, but possibly not broader education.

Design helps us understand this. Perhaps there is a reason that the curricula of these services does not feature much design so far. Perhaps predictably, there is a lot of code, and a lot of traditional humanities and science, but little design.

Udacity will shortly start its first ever design course: “The Design Of Everyday Things“, led by Don Norman, the ex-Apple legend, and Coursera’s few design-related courses tend to be at the more analytical end of the scale. In the UK, the Open University, which has been doing this sort of thing since Morris Zapp was just achieving tenure, has a new venture called FutureLearn. It has made some smart acquisitions in terms of team and university partners, but again, there is little or no design there so far.

So, could MOOCs have a role to play here? Is design education just late to this new game? Or does design education simply not fit the MOOC model?

Stefano Mirti’s “Design 101” course, for Iversity via Accademia di Belle Arti in Catania, indicates some of the promise for design education in this medium. Irresistibly Italian in presentation, Design 101 is based around regularly providing challenging briefs of things to make, with Mirti supplying context and inspiration.

And yet despite attempts to fold in collaboration and sharing, it will tend to a solitary pursuit of those exercises. At least currently. The whole point of MOOCs – one of their core values – is that they are *not* social and collaborative. Their dematerialised and dislocated state means they fit into your schedule, but in doing so, it cannot – by definition – bring you together with people at the same time and in the same space.

Design and architecture education however is, I believe, more than ever about collaboration, on working through holistic projects together, face to face, in transdisciplinary teams, learning through doing on real projects with real clients. While digital tools can support this, affording some new patterns of activity, the pull back to the physical, embodied and genuinely social is profound, particularly as systems and outcomes become more complex, more entwined, more hybridised. Schools and research centres like Strelka, CIID, Sandberg Instituut or the work we’re doing at Fabrica, are exploring exactly this, as post-institutional learning environments.

It’s difficult to see how MOOCs will really shift that aspect of design education.

The great graphic designer and typographer Erik Spiekermann once said: “You can teach yourself everything there is to be learned by observing, asking, taking things apart and putting them back together again. Teachers can help with that process as long as they stay credible. The only way to achieve that is to keep on learning themselves.”

MOOCs will not force teachers to keep learning; rather, they may encourage lecturers to constantly refine their delivery, their execution, to obsessively watch their pay-per-view ‘lecture stats’ just as most animators now lie awake at night dreaming of a Vimeo Staff Pick.

Yet if MOOCs enable us to select the very best of “jug and mug” mode education, it means only a few have to do it, after all. We could collate a “watch-list” of classic lectures – Philip Johnson on Le Corbusier, Richard Sennett on the city, Paola Antonelli on Italian design – and distribute that. There are thousands of possibilities, as TED, in its own yawningly banal way, has illustrated so far.

Much of the theory of design might be conveyed via MOOCs, and then reinforced in practice. MOOCs might free up teachers – and space – for crits, tutorials, studios and the other high value physical exchanges that cannot be distributed so easily.

Morris Zapp: “‘It’s huge, heavy, monolithic. It weighs about a billion tons. You can feel the weight of those buildings, pressing down the earth. Look at the Library – built like a huge warehouse. The whole place says, ‘We have learning stored here; if you want it, you’ve got to come inside and get it.’ Well, that doesn’t apply any more.” (Lodge, 1984)

That may be so, but the thing is, Morris, that space is important for other reasons. Design education in particular needs space to explore, to pin up and tear down, to drill holes in, to knock about.

I recently visited RMIT’s new Design Hub building in Melbourne, designed by Sean Godsell Architects, and came away impressed and dismayed in equal measure. It’s a beautiful jewel-box that is, at this early stage, not working. Over-designed and over-finished as it is, it will do little to encourage the interdisciplinary research work it supposed to afford. It too needs knocking about a bit.

For me, the ideal design education space – showing my prejudices, here – looks more like the wonderfully messy SCI-Arc in Los Angeles or Royal College of Art in London. The RCA, especially in Tony Dunne’s Design Interactions space, can sometimes feel like some kind of gloriously generative cyberpunk favela.

How will MOOCs fit alongside this? Or put it another way, what do you think the student bar at Coursera is like?

The huge opportunity behind non-certified, transdisciplinary learning is that it can be tuned to the 21st century’s needs, rather than the last century’s. Collaborative project-based learning ought to be intrinsically holistic in nature, with tangible outcomes. This is how design is practiced, and this is how design ought to be practiced in the context of learning. Putting lectures online is really just putting 20th century education on the internet, and there must be more to 21st century education than that.

Morris Zapp: “As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters – the global campus.” (Lodge, 1984)

Sidetracked by skirt and semiotics, Morris Zapp was too lazy to ask the big questions, even as he stumbled into the “global campus”. But MOOCs do give us that opportunity to ask those big questions. The fact that design education is so far largely untouched by MOOCs et al does not mean it won’t be. The internet transforms almost everything; there is no reason it won’t reorient design education. The question is how.

Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

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News: leading figures from London’s design institutions have warned that new immigration rules which make it harder for international students to stay in the UK after graduation could be a “disaster” for the city.

Kieran Long, senior curator at the V&A museum, described London as “a crossroads for great creative people to come and learn from their peers,” but warned: “Anything that stops that would be a disaster.”

Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic said: “London has really based its success on having 150 years of great art schools. They have been somewhat industrialised, got too big, and the government has also got quite curious about allowing students to stay once they’ve graduated. We need to be an open city, that’s what London always been.”

Last month the UK government announced changes to immigration rules that add “genuineness” interviews to the existing points-based hurdles students must clear if they wish to extend their leave to remain in the country once their course ends.

The new rules also introduce the power to refuse an application for a student visa extension where the applicant cannot speak English.

“It would be a disaster for London,” agreed Nigel Coates, professor emeritus at the Royal College of Art. “For creative people, London is the most attractive city in the world, partly because of its schools. But the government, confused as always, seems to be shooting itself – and us – in the foot.”

“It’s making it very, very difficult for AA students,” said Sadie Morgan, president of the Architectural Association school. “They give huge amounts to the UK economy. It’s a really big issue. It’s damaging and short-sighted of the UK government. They’re looking to be doing something aggressive about immigration but it is hugely damaging for schools like ours.”

Architectural firms can apply for visas on behalf of overseas graduates they want to employ, but Morgan said it was a “convoluted and expensive” process.

Sudjic added: “London is a remarkably successful place at attracting really smart, gifted young designers. They come to study here and lots of them build a practice here, not necessarily based on clients here, but on clients all around the world. London is a great place to be but it can’t be complacent and one of the things it has to do is go on attracting smart and new people and get them to stay.”

“London is welcoming, enterprising and full of opportunities”, said Max Fraser, deputy director of the London Design Festival. “It’s multiculturalism is one of its great selling points. We want to retain the best talent and the new visa restrictions are not conducive to that.”

London mayor Boris Johnson is understood to share the institutions’ concerns and convened a meeting with leading London arts schools this summer to discuss the issue. However, the mayor has no influence over national immigration policy. The UK’s Conservative government introduced the rules to appease backbench MPs, who demanded a tougher stance on immigration.

Dezeen spoke to leading figures in the design world during the London Design Festival last month to get their views on London’s position as a centre for design and the reasons for its current strength as a creative hub. The pre-eminence of London’s arts schools and its openness to immigration were the most-cited reason for the city’s standing as one of the world’s leading international centres for design.

“I think London has always been a place thats incredibly tolerant of new things, of people arriving in the city,” said Kieran Long. “We know that the city is based on immigration, and the people that are already here tolerating them and we’re really comfortable with that. In terms of design and architecture, we have some of the greatest schools in the world, a lot of people come to study here.”

He added: “I think there are threats to that, certainly we should keep London as open as it possibly can be and any political agenda that’s about closing that down somehow, to me, is anathema to what London really is.”

Sudjic said: “London is a great place to be but it can’t be complacent and one of the things it has to do is go on attracting smart and new people and get them to stay.”

Alex de Rijke, dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, added that funding cuts and the rising reputation of schools abroad presented new threats to London. “Inevitably you produce a lot of architects that stay for a while then go and forge a career, whereas perhaps in the future that will not be the case as emerging economies all over the world will inevitably take over cultural production. So I see, not necessarily a lessening in the influence of education here, but certainly more of a diaspora of talent.”

“As other universities around the world offer amazing opportunities for the global student population, it’s increasingly difficult to be able to offer added value,” agreed Morgan. “The added value is being able to stay and work in the UK because of the huge kudos you get from working for UK practices.”

In an interview with Dezeen during the festival Patrizia Moroso, creative director of leading Italian furniture brand Moroso, praised London’s openness to students from overseas and contrasted it with the situation in Italy, where she says underinvestment in schools is leading to the collapse of its creative industries.

“The schools [in Italy] are collapsing,” she said. “When I see our universities and design schools, they are not the best in the world, they are not so important unfortunately. If you don’t give importance to learning, not immediately but in ten years you lose a generation of material culture.”

Last month the mayor of London proposed a new “London visa” to allow exceptional creative talents to bypass the lengthy new visa application system to set up businesses in London. He told the Financial Times (£): “It is a clear message to the elite of Silicon Valley or the fashionistas of Beijing that London is the place they should come to develop ideas, build new businesses and be part of an epicentre for global talent.”

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News: UK government ministers are to scrap the draft design and technology syllabus for secondary schools amid claims by industry figures including inventor James Dyson (pictured) that the curriculum had been “diluted” with skills such as cooking and gardening.

The Department for Education will now review subject requirements after admitting to the Telegraph that the curriculum, which was drawn up just two months ago, had been “dumbed down”.

The document was criticised after it emerged that pupils aged between five and 14 would receive lessons in sewing and knitting, bicycle maintenance and cultivating plants for “decorative displays”.

Writing in The Times in February, James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner, said the academic rigour demanded in other core subjects was missing in the government’s “diluted” design and technology draft syllabus.

“Life skills such as how to grill a tomato and what to do if your bike chain falls off take pride of place,” he said. “Gardening has become a key component in a subject that should contextualise science and maths in a practical format.”

Pupils should learn to invent as well as mend and maintain, he added. “If the British automotive industry is to continue its renaissance it needs young engineers capable of questioning and improving rather than just fixing.”

During consultations, which ended on 16 April, Britain’s Design Council urged people to campaign against the “potentially retrograde proposal for design in our schools”, while the Design & Technology Association, a body that campaigns for design and technology teaching, said the draft syllabus would “seriously undermine 20 years of development in the subject”.

A government source yesterday told the Telegraph the revised curriculum would be geared towards helping pupils towards jobs in manufacturing, engineering and computer-aided design. “We have had a lot of good ideas on how to make the D&T curriculum more rigorous and more in line with what industry needs,” the source said.

The move comes just two months after the government abandoned controversial plans that would have removed design and other creative subjects from the compulsory school curriculum after age 14, proposals that were fought by key industry figures such as Apple’s Jonathan Ive and architect Norman Foster as part of the #IncludeDesign campaign.

D&AD president Neville Brody had described the government’s plans to “demolish” creative education as “insanity”, telling Dezeen: “The creative industries need high-quality creative graduates. If we’re not getting the graduates, we’re not going to sustain the industry.”

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Photograph by Eva Rinaldi.

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curriculum scrapped by UK ministers appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the University of Minnesota has launched a new programme that will halve the time it takes for students to gain a licence to practise architecture in the United States.

With a stronger emphasis on professional practice, the Masters of Science in Architecture – Research Practices (MS-RP) course will fast-track students towards taking the licencing exam within six months of completing the course, around seven or eight years after graduating from high school. This is around half time taken by most students, who take the exam 14.5 years after graduating from high school according to a report released in June 2012.

The inaugural report from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, NCARB by the Numbers 2012, found that on average students spend eight and a half years studying and an additional six years completing an internship before qualifying as an architect. This is significantly greater than countries like the UK or Germany, where the whole process typically takes around seven to eight years.

Discussing why it takes many students so long, course director Renée Cheng told Dezeen that it can be difficult to gain relevant experience from internships in practice after studying: “Those that we know of who get delayed are sometimes due to the economy and because the types of experience they getting are not aligning with the IDP (Intern Development Programme) areas needed.”

The School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota‘s College of Design plans to reduce this time by allowing students to start logging IDP credits from as soon as they start studying architecture, whether they begin by taking a Bachelor of Science in Architecture straight out of high school or if they start at post-graduate level. In addition to their taught classes, students will take part in research projects for architecture firms and non-profit organisations and will be paid for their work.

Above: concept diagram from the University of Minnesota’s College of Design

“During the program, we have calculated workload hours and study time is counted in,” said Cheng. “We talked with some of our current students who have outside work and in some cases this program is less than what they are doing now. It is intense, probably on the order of 55-60 hours per week all included, but since several of the areas are strongly intertwined the overlap of topics should make it feel more coherent.”

Within this framework, Students on the MS-RP course are expected to earn the full 930 hours of IDP credit required to allow them to take the final licencing exam.

The course directors explain: “We believe that by offering this model, we nudge the profession towards true culture change, one that expects all our students can be licenced upon graduation, regardless of their final career choices. This change extends to architectural firms and the building industry, transforming the culture to one of sharing knowledge in the effort to collaboratively tackle the serious ‘wicked problems’ affecting the built environment.”

The university will begin accepting applications to the course this spring and expects to take on between four and eight students in the autumn semester. “Later numbers may grow to between eight and twelve but it may never be large enough on its own to make the change we aspire to, so the partnership with other schools and firms is essential to future growth,” added Cheng.

The news follows recent debate over plans for the UK education system to remove design and other creative subjects from the core school curriculum.

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Photograph of architectural equipment from Shutterstock.

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