26
EDUCACIO EN DISSENY,
2009
Doctoral Education in Design Problems and Prospects
This paper considers the status of design research and underlines the importance of setting up clear objectives for doctoral programs within this discipline. For this reason, it compiles a list of key
considerations in order to advance towards a consensus in respect to
these type of academic programs.
The Nature of Design Research
In October 1998, the first conference on doctoral education in design was held at the Ohio State University. Sponsored by Design Issues, The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and the Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design at Ohio State University, it brought together participants from a number of countries and resulted in a published set of papers.1 In his keynote address to the conference, Richard Buchanan, then Director of The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and a co-editor of Design Issues, made a distinction between paleoteric thinking, which he said was “based on the identification of discrete subject matters, such as we find throughout the university today,” and neoteric thinking, which was “based on new problems encountered in practical life and in serious theoretical reflection.” The goal of paleoteric education, he continued, was to ”expand the knowledge of a particular subject matter, often in greater and greater detail,” while the goal of neoteric education was to “gather resources from any area of previous learning in order to find new ways of addressing the new problems, thereby creating a new body of learning and knowledge.”2 Buchanan envisioned doctoral education in design as a neoteric enterprise that could become “a model of what the new learning may be in our universities and in our culture as a whole.”3 Since that conference and several others that followed in La Clusaz, France (2000), Tsukuba, Japan (2003) and Tempe, Arizona (2005), interest in doctoral education in design has increased considerably and a large number of new programmes have been established.4 Today they exist in many countries around the world and more programmes are on the way, despite the fact that the fundamental questions about what constitutes doctoral education and what it is for remain unresolved. Most new programmes are devised locally without reference to others elsewhere. What then are we to make of this cacophony of doctorates, each claiming that its recipients possess a body of knowledge that both signifies a mastery of the design field and qualifies them to contribute to it by producing research of their own? To raise questions about the state and status of doctoral education, we also need to consider the state of design research, a field that itself remains equally cacophonous and without a set of shared problematics. Of most concern, at least to this writer, is a lack of consensus as to how we identify the subject matter of design and, of equal importance, what design research is for. The first question may be easier to answer than the second. Richard Buchanan was correct when he stated in his Ohio State address, “Design does not have a subject matter in the traditional sense of other disciplines and fields of learning.”5 Elsewhere he broadly characterised the subject matter of design thus: “Design is the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes.”6 Buchanan’s broad definition is one that I share. A related definition had been put forth twenty years earlier by Bruce Archer, director of the Design Research Department at the Royal College of Art in London. In a seminal conference paper on design research, Archer stated that design with a small d was “the combined embodiment of configuration, composition, structure, purpose, value and meaning in man-made things and systems.”7 What the definitions of Buchanan and Archer have in common is that they conceive design broadly and do not limit it to a set of given taxonomic categories. As Buchanan noted, designers are continually inventing new subject matter; thus it is not possible to limit the investigation of design to a fixed set of material or immaterial products. Given the fact that design is not fixed but is continually developing, we need to distinguish between how it is constituted as a subject for design researchers and those who educate them and how subject matter is constituted for scientists and scholars in the humanities. When we study design, we study a form of human action that arises from a social situation. Design is thus part of the study of society rather than nature. According to the social constructivists, society itself is a contingent phenomenon whose structure and organisation, like design products, is human made rather than decreed by nature. Like design research, social research may be concerned with what has been done, what currently is and what might be. I don’t, however, wish to draw too close a comparison between the social world as a constructed entity and the world of products, which is only one part of it.8 The social world is far more complex and requires many more disciplines to study its diverse aspects. Nonetheless, the realm of design does partake of this complexity in that the production, distribution and use of products are part of a larger social process. I now want to distinguish the study of design from two other subjects that are rooted in the natural, rather than the social, world. I am not going to draw a reductive comparison between the two worlds, claiming that the natural world is completely a product of nature and the social world is completely a product of human construction. In fact, humans have intervened in nature throughout history and what appears to us as the natural world today is a world that has absorbed these interventions. Nonetheless, what differentiates today’s natural world from the social world is the degree of cause and effect that arises as a result of human intervention. To clarify this difference, let us look at the history of research on the human body that has lead to our current understanding of health and its absence. For centuries, researchers mapped the human body, identifying its anatomy, its organs, and more recently its genetic structure. On the basis of this mapping, theories of medicine arose which today are the basis for maintaining a given level of health. As a result of medical knowledge, a host of interventions that range from medical procedures and drugs to artificial limbs and organs has evolved. There is much that we still do not understand about the human body and the factors that cause its illness but many problems have been identified and researchers continue to work on them. The reason for mentioning the human body here is to present a research paradigm that I will then compare with a related paradigm for design research. To make my point, I will not make reference to the research on the human mind which is considerably less developed than that on the body in that we can explain less about how and why humans behave as they do than we can about how the body functions. The paradigm of research on the body is based on the following premises:
In sum, the history of research on the body has resulted in a community of medical investigators who work within a relatively well-defined set of problems. Their investigation is supported by a system of pedagogy, journals, conferences and funding from government and private sources. The distribution of funds allocated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the World Health Organization, for example, is based on the confidence that money well spent will help to eliminate certain diseases. We can also consider another research paradigm based on the study of the Earth and the natural forces that affect it. Over centuries geographers and other scientists have mapped the physical structure of the Earth and learned to understand the delicate balance of its surrounding environment and its ecosystems that also include living beings from insects to humans. As with the human body, we have seen that absent the conditions for healthy life, the Earth becomes unhealthy. This, in turn affects the quality of human life. Given the vast complexity of the Earth compared to the human body, it is easier for sceptics to doubt the claims that the Earth’s health depends on particular conditions that are partly created by human behaviour. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, many scientists argue, contributes to global warming. Evidence is to be seen in the melting of the polar ice cap and in severe climate change. Researchers of several types—biologists, geophysicists, botanists, chemists and many others—study the Earth. Although they work in different fields, their research methods are compatible and the findings of researchers in one field can be related to those in another. As with the study of the human body, there is a general consensus on research methods and how to assess the validity of research results. By contrast with the natural world, the constitution of the social world as a field of study entails a far higher degree of constructivism than the study of the human body or the Earth; that is to say, there is no point of origin where the social world was given to humans as a prior phenomenon. It was and continues to be created by us. Over the years, many social scientists have sought to explain social processes in terms of laws but these explanations have always been tentative and few have resulted in satisfactory predictions of social behaviour that can be counted on. The fact that design is a contingent practice makes its study significantly different from the study of a given phenomenon like the human body or the Earth. On the one hand, design is evident in what has already been done—the products that have been created in the past along with the conditions of their production and use; on the other hand, design is an activity that produces new products, hence its study needs to focus in part on how that is done; what new products might be produced and how. The history of design education is rather short. Design for industry and mass communication arose from craft practices and techniques. Although the Industrial Revolution began in the eighteenth century, the practices that we today call product design and graphic design had their roots in the 1920s and 1930s and educational programmes to train designers began in those years. Master’s degrees in design that qualified designers to teach others are a post-World War II phenomenon. Bruce Archer writes that the Design Research Department at the Royal College of Art was converted in 1976 to a postgraduate teaching department where Master’s and PhD degrees were awarded.9 While it is clear that the principal purpose of the Master’s degree was to prepare teachers of design by offering more advanced design courses and the opportunity to engage in a modest research project, the purpose of a general doctorate in design has never been well articulated. In several countries, the doctorate has become a symbol for research and has been made a requirement for teachers of design. Thus the degree is more symbolic than pragmatic and the need to do research is not driven by a shared research problem or set of problems but instead by the need to maintain the status of the degree. Problems with Design Doctorates We can cite a number of reasons why the purpose of design doctorates remains unclear or questionable. First is the dissociation of design research from the design professions. Even though design within the broad definitions of Buchanan, Archer and others can embrace engineering, architecture and computer science as well as product design, interior design and communication design, these communities of practitioners are sharply divided and the fields of engineering, architecture and computer science have their own doctorates. The communities of product and communication designers have not been engaged in discussions about doctoral education in design and consequently the international design associations such as ICOGRADA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations), ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) and IFI (International Federation of Interior Designers/Architects) have no connection to the world of design research as it is represented by IASDR (International Association of Societies of Design Research).10 Consequently, the general field of practice is not calling for a higher degree to meet a specific purpose. The result of this is that there is no connection between the design research community and those who design. A second reason is that a great deal of interesting work that might well be called design research is being carried out by experts who were not trained in that field. Large corporations like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and many others hire PhDs for their research teams in fields ranging from electrical and software engineering to anthropology and psychology. Deutsche Telekom, for example, has a large research centre, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, which does research on future products and services. Intel, also, hires academics to conduct field work on how consumers use mobile phones and other products. One can assume that extensive research on new products continues in all large corporations that produce consumer goods. These range from Samsung in Korea to Nokia in Finland. In general, there is no clear connection between the needs of these companies for experts in the design of complex objects and systems and the universities that should be producing such experts. One exception to this lack is the Media Lab at MIT, where doctorates are awarded to students who work on a range of projects that involve design although they are not necessarily called by that name. Graduates of the Media Lab are well prepared to undertake design-related tasks of an advanced nature and some find their way to positions in large corporations. The newly-formed Aalto University in Helsinki, which resulted from a merger between the University of Art and Design, the Helsinki School of Economics and the Helsinki University of Technology, also plans to offer advanced studies in design-related fields in order to meet the government’s call for more innovation. Unfortunately, the research done by industry is proprietary and does not form part of the achievements with which the international design research community is publicly identified.11 Consequently, a survey of research topics as indicated by various conference proceedings does not yield a strong sense of consensual problems for which researchers are finding solutions. An additional reason is the lack of communication between the different design research communities that exist in fields like engineering, interaction design, software design, and so forth. While much research in these communities is technical and therefore not easily accessible to those outside the immediate circle of researchers, there is little discussion in the general design literature about how relations between these research fields might be improved. One conclusion to draw from this analysis is that doctorates in design need to have some focus just as they do in the related field of engineering. There is no single doctorate in engineering nor is there a single research community. Generally, a university will have a College of Engineering with separate departments for electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, bioengineering, aeronautical engineering and other specialities, all of which were created to address specific sets of practical problems. In the future, we may see something similar in design as doctorates are offered in interaction design, transportation design, organisation design, social network design, service design and many other potential fields.12 Such doctorates ought to arise as problem areas are identified, thus lending assurance to students in those programmes that they will be entering a job market that has a need for their expertise. To complement these doctorates in design, there is a need for advanced degrees in design history and design studies. Design history is already a distinct field with various opportunities for doctoral study. As a research field it is well developed with several academic journals, regular conferences and a stream of high quality research that comes not only from trained design historians but also from historians in diverse fields who find design compelling as a subject of research. The one problem in the field is that it is defined to narrowly. Most design historians tend to concentrate on the paleoteric taxonomies of objects rather than embrace the neoteric manifestations of design practice.13 Design studies is also an aspect of design research whose territory is yet to be clarified. I will argue as I have done in the past that design history can be seen as one strand of a broader field of design studies.14 Together they investigate design as it was and currently is, concentrating on the production and use of products. Design history, however, focuses on design in the past, while design studies embraces the present as well. There are good reasons to create doctoral programmes in design studies, since the graduates of such programmes would not be expected to be designers as well unless they had prior training as practitioners. By contrast, the expectation for someone with a PhD in design should be that he or she is capable of designing something. Therefore, specialisation is required in order gain knowledge that will prepare graduates for specific tasks. Moving Forward In order to sort out the confusion that exists in the fields of design research and doctoral design education, the following issues need to be addressed:
To envision how the field of design research might develop further, we can return to the distinction that Bruce Archer makes between the way a lexicographer and a mathematician think about language. “The lexicographer,” says Archer, “attempts to discover the meaning of words and phrases on the basis of the ways in which the words and phrases are actually used and meant by the community concerned. The mathematician, by contrast, is careful to define his terms, either for the occasion or in reference to some previous worker’s definition.”15 Archer’s preference is for the lexicographer’s approach, which he admires for its flexibility. His distinction between deriving meaning from usage or prior definitions can also hold for design researchers. Rather than define research objectives too strictly, it is more productive, as Archer suggests, to build on what researchers are actually doing. Research nodes, which represent accumulations of related research activities, need to attract interest through their potential for significance and value. When the researchers in a field are clear about what they do, such nodes appear readily. When the research agenda is murky, they do not appear at all. Conclusion Despite the fact that the subject matter of design research is not as clearly defined as the human body or the Earth, much valuable work has been done. Design research is international, although the communication of results between researchers in different countries is hampered by the lack of a common language. While English is the most prevalent language among researchers, there are many scholars in Brazil, Japan, Korea and other countries whose work is not known outside their own language group.16 This is particularly evident in design history, where much research has been published in non-Anglophone countries and is unknown to most design historians. Consequently, much that is already known is absent from the design history surveys, which leave out design in large parts of the globe. There is a need to review the history of design research and identify a group of texts that are still seminal to researchers, whether they are historical documents or more recent books and articles. Such texts should form a core curriculum whose contents can be shared by researchers in different doctoral programmes 17. The purpose of such texts within a research community is to constitute a common heritage that can reinforce the idea that design researchers are engaged in a shared enterprise, no matter how diverse their interests. There should also be more reference to such texts in what we might call the meta-literature of the field, the body of research that reinterprets and re-evaluates key documents just as is done by scholars in sociology, anthropology, literature and art history. As the artificial world continues to expand in its relation to nature, design is too important a subject to be ignored. We humans are the stewards of this artificial world just as we are responsible for the natural one. Only by preparing ourselves to manage an increasingly complex natural and social environment in which design plays an ever more important role, will we be able to fulfill our duty as good stewards. Well-conceived and highly focused doctoral programmes in design are central to this task. 1. See BUCHANAN, Richard; DOORDAN, Dennis; JUSTICE, Lorraine; MARGOLIN, Victor (eds.) (1999). Doctoral Education in Design 1998: Proceedings of the Ohio Conference, October 8-11, 1998. Pittsburgh, The School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University. 2. BUCHANAN, Richard (1999). “The Study of Design: Doctoral Education and Research in a New Field of Inquiry”, in Doctoral Education in Design 1998: Proceedings of the Ohio Conference, October 8 – 11, 1998, pp. 6-7. 3. Ibid., p. 7. 4. See DURLING, David; FRIEDMAN, Ken (Eds.) (2000). Doctoral Education in Design: Foundations for the Future. Proceedings of the Conference held at La Clusaz, France, 8-12 July, 2000. Staffordshire: Staffordshire University Press; DURLING, David; SUGIYAMA, Kazuo (Eds.) (2003). Proceedings of the 3rd Doctoral Education in Design Conference, Tsukuba International Congress Center, Tsukuba, Japan. 14-17 October, 2003. 5. BUCHANAN, Richard. “The Study of Design: Doctoral Education and Research in a New Field of Inquiry”, op. cit., p. 7. 6. BUCHANAN, Richard (2001). “Design Research and the New Learning”. Design Issues, Vol.17, No. 4, p. 9. 7. ARCHER, Bruce (1981). “A View of the Nature of Design Research”, in: JACQUES, Robin; POWELL, James A. (Eds.). Design, Science, Method. Guilford, United Kingdom: Westbury House/IPC Science and Technology Press, p. 30. 8. See my essay, “The Product Milieu” in BUCHANAN, Richard and MARGOLIN, Victor (Eds.) (1995). Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 9. ARCHER, Bruce. “A View of the Nature of Design Research”, op. cit., p. 32. Archer does not indicate in his article, however, when the first PhD in design was awarded at the RCA. 10. Members of the IASDR are the China Institute of Design, the Design Research Society, the Design Society, the Japanese Society for the Science of Design and the Korean Society for Design Science. 11. There are occasional exceptions to this situation of proprietary research. See the article by Genevieve Bell (2006), a staff anthropologist at Intel, “Satu Keluarga, Satu Komputer (One Home, One Computer): Cultural Accounts of ICTs in South and Southeast Asia”, Design Issues, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 35-55. 12. See, for example, the special number of Design Issues dedicated to Design and Organizational Change, Design Issues, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2008). 13. I address this issue in my essay “Design in History”, Design Issues, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2009), pp. 94-105. 14. See my essay “Design History and Design Studies”, in MARGOLIN, Victor (2002). The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 15. ARCHER, Bruce. “A View of the Nature of Design Research”, p. 30. 16. There are regular design and design studies research congresses that are held in Japan, Korea, Brazil, and elsewhere in languages other than English. The proceedings of these congresses, if not bilingual as they rarely are, remain unknown to researchers in Europe and the United States, who occupy a major position in the international design and design studies research fields. 17. See my bibliographic essay, “Postwar Design Literature: A Preliminary Mapping”, in MARGOLIN, Victor (Ed.) (1998). Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 265-288. |
Sobre l'autor
VICTOR MARGOLIN
Professor d'Història del Disseny a l'Escola d'Art i Disseny de la Universitat d’Illinois.
Fundador i director de revistes de disseny. Autor d'American Poster Renaissance (New York, 1975) i The Great Age of Poster Design 1890-1900 (1975). Editor de The Art of Persuasion. World WarII
(1975), Design History Bibliography (Icograde, University of Illinois, 1987) i Design Discourse; History,
Theory, Criticism (Chicago,
1989).
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s’han començat a interessar pels processos i mètodes de pensament dels
dissenyadors, dos dels aspectes més importants dels quals són l’atenció
centrada en els usuaris i el pensament de sistemes. Alhora, els estudis
empresarials es poden beneficiar d’incorporar alguns dels conceptes i
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problemes, utilitzar la recerca etnogràfica, raonar abductivament,
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