Hasta La Ideas

We are now in the 21st century, but design curricula seem stuck in the mid 20th century, except for the addition of computer tools. The 20th century developed craftspeople capable of magnificent products. But these were relatively simple products, with simple mechanical or electrical components. In the 21st century, design has broadened to include interaction and experience, services and strategies. The technologies are more sophisticated, involving advanced materials, computation, communication, sensors and actuators. The products and services have complex interactions that have to be self-explanatory, sometimes involving other people separated by time or distance. Traditional design activities have to be supplemented with an understanding of technology, business and human psychology.

With all these changes, one would expect major changes in design education. Nope. Design education is led by craftspeople who are proud of their skills and they see no reason to change. Design education is mired in the past.

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When Don Norman wrote that he is “made to read a lot of crap” in Why Design Education Must Change, he had me sighing in agreement. Around ninety-percent of the design and design education research I read sends me to sleep. I am interested in design, education and research and the futures of all three, but why is the strike rate of interesting material so low? It leaves me rather depressed about a discipline that claims creativity to be among its key attributes. When it comes to engaging in public discourse, design research has suffered a failure of imagination.

I should clarify here that when I am talking about design research, I am talking of institutional, mainly academic research. I’m not talking about research that designers do in design practice. That this needs explaining is part of the problem, of which more in a moment.

The media regularly contains calls from scientists for more research funding, more science to be taught in schools and claims for the enormous importance of science to the world. STEM subjects—an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics—are the centrepiece of curriculum development and the associated funding. Newspaper columns and sections are devoted to science. Entire television channels and expensive series, such as the BBC’s highly successful Wonders… series featuring Professor Brian Cox, are directly aimed to inspire and ignite the imaginations of schoolchildren and adults alike. Where are the equivalents for design? Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica and Objectified may have been seen by most Core77 readers, but I doubt the average schoolchild is aware of either of them.

To be clear, I’m not bashing science. Science is important, as are technology, engineering and mathematics, but this is just one side of the coin (and brain). Given that the world is not only filled with designed objects and media, but also suffering under the enormous weight and consumption of much of them, design clearly has a central role to play in society for good or ill. Where are the impassioned calls for the role of design and for teaching design in curricula debates in mainstream media? Where are the TV programs, magazines and books? I am not talking about superficial style magazines or the design periodicals that essentially print articles on the reverse pages of press releases. Where are the design equivalents of Scientific American or National Geographic? Why isn’t design debated in government in the same way as STEM subjects?

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Back in 2004, I wrote an article called 1000 Words of Advice for Design Students. Flattered that several departments were using the document in their curricula, I followed it up with 1000 Words of Advice for Design Teachers, in 2006 (not used very much in curricula, that one!). For the past year I’ve been putting together the bones of a new MFA program in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, welcoming its first students in the fall of 2012. (Applications for the inaugural class open this month.) So now it’s a year in and a year away, and I thought it might be a nice idea to revisit the 1000-word format, document some of the thoughts and strategies and arguments for the new program, and lay the groundwork for the certain learning ahead. It turns out that 1000 words is woefully insufficient for discussing the most important aspects of the program, but it’s a taste, and if you’d like to learn more, please do head over to productsofdesign.sva.edu where you’ll find mission statements, Q&As, and more curriculum information than you’ll be able to save to Instapaper. In the meantime, here we go, again: Exactly 1000 words below.

You Are What You Eat
The first decision made for the MFA Products of Design department had nothing to do with philosophy or pedagogy or accreditation; it had to do with food. We’ve devoted a significant amount of the architecture and planning to what we eat—with generous prep space, two full-size fridges and sinks, rice cookers, steamers, slow-cookers and other industrial-grade implements that will help students do better, think better and feel better by supporting their food energy needs. Butcher-block classroom tables gang up into short and long dining tables; drawing demo mirrors double as cooking demo counters. One of the preeminent greenmarkets is five minutes away from the school, open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays of every week. Several of our faculty are passionate about, and plan to do coursework around, food and food systems. Students will be encouraged to form dinner co-ops (you cook a meal to feed 6 people once a week; the other days you eat someone else’s).

I’ve gotten two major criticisms on this one: The first is “But the studio will smell!” Yes, it will. It will smell like food. (Most smell like plastic.) The second is “Students are out of control! I mean, who will clean the coffee maker?” Oh hell, I will.

Build a Place, Not a Space
It’s been a big challenge finding the sweet spot of what to provide students in terms of individual workspace, collaborative space, leisure, model making, presentation and celebration space. But space has been the wrong word all along of course; the goal is to create place, not space. And that’s where architect Andrea Steele and her team have landed, taking a holistic approach to how the philosophy and the pragmatics of the program get instantiated in its built environment.

We’ve used several principles here: Build as little as possible, keeping elements versatile, resilient, and nimble; Give everything more than one purpose, leveraging vertical elements for both display and domain; Recognize that the biggest waste of space in a school is the classroom. Ours are sundrenched, tech-equipped, and furnished as students’ project rooms. And once every day, from 5 to 8pm, they turn into classrooms. Provide welcome for bicycles, accommodate personal phone calls. You get the idea.

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Think before acting. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Think before starting to design. Yup. Do some research, learn more about the requirements, the people, the activities. Then design. It all makes sense. Which is precisely why I wish to challenge it. Sometimes it makes sense to act first, think afterwards.

In the real world of product development, time is always short and budgets limited, so it is almost impossible to start with research. “Yes,” the product manager will say, “I know we should do some research first, but we don’t have time, we are too far behind schedule. But for the next project, we will start with research, OK?” It never happens. The next project will also start out with no time, behind schedule. In fact, let me create a law:

Norman’s Law of Product Development: A project is behind schedule and over its budget the day it is started.

Today we teach the importance of doing design research first, then going through a period of ideation, prototyping and iterative refinement. Lots of us like this method. I do. I teach it. But this makes no sense when practical reality dictates that we do otherwise. If there is never enough time to start with research, then why do we preach such an impractical method? We need to adjust our methods to reality, not to some highfalutin, elegant theory that only applies in the perfect world of academic dreams. We should develop alternative strategies for design.

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Like two pugilists in a ring, creative collaborations require passion, ambition and a good dose of competitiveness if they’re to deliver results that matter.

I’ve been giving ‘collaboration’ a lot of thought. I guess that’s inevitable when you work in a company that’s partner to one of the longest running collaborative gigs in design consulting. In design circles, especially around award time, collaboration gets a lot of airplay—but what happens to it the rest of the time? Why is something we praise as being so conducive to design success so infrequently discussed in design forums? More to the point, what is it about collaboration that makes me giddy with optimism on one hand while forcing me to contemplate popping an antacid with the other? I guess, when I come right down to it, it’s that collaboration, by definition a joint enterprise, is often invoked by persons or interests having very little patience for the stuff. Sure it’s nice to make a lot of noise about it, but should you act on it, or call upon it in earnest, you’d better be sure collaboration is what the folks sitting across the table have signed up for.

As a young designer, I always believed that when someone spoke to me at length about collaboration it was some veiled reference to my impending need for behavior modification. Alternatively, when I found myself in cultures that used the term liberally—my gut shrank up trying to determine if ‘collaboration’ was code for ‘the client-is-always-right.’ Three and a half years after returning to the world of consulting, I’ve come to believe that collaboration is quite possibly THE pivotal dynamic in generating great design results. No big surprise right? But when I think about collaboration, what I increasingly imagine is something I like to call competitive collaboration, an all out, skin-in the game style of cooperation that requires real commitment from both parties, not the whimsical feel-good stuff that so easily dissipates at the first sign of trouble. With that in mind, I thought I’d share a few observations on behaviors that I believe lead to successful collaborations and, when we’re lucky, great design programs.

WORK HARD aka ENGAGEMENT

As Philippe Starck has eloquently observed “Design hates lazy people” and it does. Design is hard work for clients and consultants alike. The best results stubbornly defy us by the elliptical fashion in which they arrive. You can work your ass off on a given problem and move it an inch or, you glance out the studio window and move it a mile. The rub of it is you can’t count on either track to yield consistent results. Instead we work. And work again. Some might say it gets easier with experience, and it does, but the fact of the matter is, if you find design problems getting easier—you are most likely repeating yourself. Attacking a problem with fresh eyes means daring to start fresh—and that is hard work. Beyond the adrenaline rush of the creative chase, the thing that makes this otherwise intolerable process bearable is engagement; the zone in which we find ourselves fully committed to the pursuit of that first spark and the subsequent journey with which we eek out its promise. The only way I know how to get there is through deep engagement—my own, my colleagues and my clients. Without it, programs drift leading dangerously toward indifference, which in design most often leads to mediocrity and crap.

GET DIRTY aka PROTOTYPE

While you’re doing this ‘hard’ work, you will of course get dirty. Which is just another way of saying you’ll need to check your ego at the door, roll up your sleeves and be willing to fail—more importantly, be willing to make. Making is an inextricable part of good design exploration. PowerPoint is an abstraction of an abstraction. Things don’t fail quickly in abstract. Nothing brings clarity faster to an abstract conversation like a ‘thing.’ If you want to drive powerful, effective decision-making with your client, the type that leads quickly and brutally to decisions—my advice is to MAKE. Whether we are talking about things, experiences or otherwise—prototyping, putting your ideas into action so that they might (more often than not) prove you wrong, is critical to the mechanism of design. Today we have an arsenal of tools at our disposal to make and fab: Dimension machines, Aruduino boards, After Effects, you name it. There is little excuse not to make. Which begs the question, if the team you’re collaborating with isn’t bringing ‘things’ to the table, what are they bringing? Talk? If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d be willing to bet a prototype is worth two thousand, easy. The difference between a good idea and a great idea is execution. My advice: make.

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