Hasta La Ideas

I was privileged to be interviewed by Steven Heller for piece just published on AIGA’s Voice called “To Design or Not to Design: A Conversation with Allan Chochinov. In the interview Steve and I talk about product design, design imperatives, and design education, and it was a great chance to flesh out some ideas around sustainability, responsibility, and pedagogy. Here’s my favorite exchange:

Heller: Students have the right to choose to be “citizen designers.” I believe my students should not be herded into a pen where all they do is follow the golden rule, but I believe I–we–have an obligation to teach them to design in a responsible manner for a realistic goal. I also believe that they must be taught to convince others of the rightness of what they are doing. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, so to speak: They can be too convincing and, like Bernie Madoff, be total scoundrels. How do we keep designers from pulling the wool over the client’s and the public’s eyes? I believe we must be diligent about our critiques and what we accept or not. Too often students are allowed to get away with things that would not be accepted by professionals, under the guise of allowing them to grow. Have you been affected by that conundrum?

Chochinov: This is something I talk a lot about in class, actually–the notion of what is “playing fair” and how these students have been manipulated and bullied by all the forces active in contemporary culture, and how they are now learning the skills to fight back, and how they can be used for good rather than evil. I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but the art of design is very often the art of persuasion–whether it happens through a product or an ad campaign or a poster or a piece of interactive media. So preparing the practitioners of that art comes with an added responsibility–on top of the “training” and “educating” I alluded to before.

But when you offer that “too often students are allowed to get away with things that would not be accepted by professionals under the guise of allowing them to grow,” I’d like to propose a caution: Professionals are some of the worst offenders, of course, and preparing students for “professional practice” may be preparing them for the compromises, complicity and propagation of the same unsustainable values and outputs that we now understand to be the dark side of design, advertising, marketing and mass production. I think school is exactly the place where they should be getting away with an unbelievable amount–particularly grad school.

Read the whole thing here.

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