D&AD

We’ve all seen exciting projects that blur the boundaries between disciplines. We’ve also observed the shifting of emphasis within those disciplines and the emergence of new areas of practice.

Exciting though such developments are, they raise important and difficult questions for students (what skills to acquire) and for education (what to teach). Designer and lecturer Tim Parsons comments upon the emerging landscape of post-disciplinary design education.

It seemed so easy when I graduated. There was a vocational air to design training – you were heading for a particular, well-defined job at the end of your degree. In the 14 years since, I’ve seen disciplines morph, grown arms that have become new disciplines (web design, interaction design, service design), and as a result, the landscape for new graduates seems at best confusing and at worst daunting.

For example, my field, product design, promoted a skill set that emphasised analytical problem solving with the ability to represent elegant forms in two and three dimensions. The focus was very much upon the object and the benefits, both practical and emotional, it would provide to the user.

Since then, it has expanded its boundaries in a number of different directions. Inspired by contemporary art, one shift sees designers shunning mass-production and client relationships in exchange for the ‘freedom’ of producing statement pieces for the gallery and auction markets.

Graduates who would have exhibited hand-built prototypes at their degree shows in the hope of enticing interest from manufacturers, are inclined to get even further into debt by investing in show-stopping one-offs, made using the latest CAD and rapid prototyping equipment.

Pulling in precisely the opposite direction, a new form of design consultancy under the name ‘Design Thinking’ suggests product designers leave the CAD station and workshop and take their place in the boardroom of big business. Its protagonists talk of working on “the fuzzy front end of product definition” or as the rest of us call it, “writing the brief”. It packages existing problem solving methods to a new set of clients, in particular those who do not sell physical products. To some it’s the emperor’s new clothes of corporate bullshit. To others it paves the way for designers to finally be taken seriously at management level and to have a far greater impact upon changing the world than they had when they were defining radii on the edges of injection mouldings.

Similar shifts are happening in other disciplines and it begs the question: How do colleges deal with these changes? Some try to capitalise upon the emergence of new niche disciplines by setting up niche courses. This may adequately fulfil the isolated need for specific skills (ticking various government and private sector boxes) but can have the disadvantage of dramatically narrowing the student’s awareness of the wider field.

At a young age, some students are being channelled towards studying highly specialised subject areas when the majority need more time to discover where their passions lie. The opposite approach sees multi-disciplinary courses becoming even broader, trying to offer a taste of as many aspects of a subject as they can. Here, breadth is achieved but depth of experience usually suffers. So what’s the answer?

If the question is how do we best educate students to have a thorough knowledge of a design field and sufficient skills to practice it in 3 years, the answer, as these fields enlarge and change, is surely – we can’t. A three year full-time degree implies 3600 hours of studying based upon a 40 hour week – some way off the oft quoted (although somewhat spurious) figure of 10,000 hours believed to be needed to master a skill. This is not to elude the terrific responsibility of teaching as much as we can in those three years – to provide a broad awareness, to develop a level of ability and to allow students to follow a path that appeals to their intellect and is appropriate to their skills.

My point is that as the disciplinary landscape becomes more complex, the notion that higher education is a rich beginning to a long journey and not a complete product is ever more relevant. This ethos needs to be supported within education and clearly communicated to students if graduates are to feel that have been well served by their courses.

Tim Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Three-Dimensional Design at Camberwell College of Arts and author of Thinking: Objects – Contemporary Approaches to Product Design.

For more of Tim’s work and writing visit www.timparsons.info.

Illustration by Harriet McDougall