06
PEDAGOGIA DEL DISSENY,
1991
Design down under capricorn. Design: a cultural and economic imperativeIn May 1989 a large gathering of designers from every
kind of design activity together with design educators and industry leaders
held what was described as the Australian Design Summit in the national
capital, Canberra.
From that meeting came the resolution to create a new national focus body for
design. Thirteen months later, in September 1990 this new design iniciative was
to be formally launched as the Australian
Academy of Design.
The objectives of the Academy, whilst focused on the
future of design in Australia,
provide an interesting agenda which has, I believe, a significant relationship
to the future directions, challenges and possibilities of design education at
every level and in every nation of the world.
The choice of the traditional title of Academy for
this new design body was the subject of much debate and some concern that its
focus might well be perceived merely as an attempt to elevate the activity of
design to the same level of high scholarly regard that is traditionally
accorded to the learned Academies of the Arts and the Sciences.
Indeed, many design educators would no doubt argue
that the achievement of a higher scholarly regard for, and the recognition of
the design activity alongside the traditional learned institutions of the Arts
and Sciences, would do much to advance the status of the field within the
entrenched hierarchy of subjects recognised as the Core curriculum of primary
and secondary education and as a discipline within the University.
Design or perish?
The aims and objectives of the new Academy of Design
are expressed in much more practical and instrumental terms, and also convey a
sense of urgency and a call for action. This may suggest that this European
outpost, amongst the awakening giants of the developing nations of the
Pan-Indian Ocean Pacific region may, indeed, be articulating a sense of the
potential erosion of its cultural and regional identity, to say nothing of its
status as an advanced technological society and all of the material comforts
that go with this. Those aims and objectives are:
- To provide
the national focus for design and the impetus to design necessary for Australia's
future economic and environmental prosperity.
- To promote the
acceptance of the role and benefit of design as crucial elements in Australia's
economic performance and for the well-being of all Australians.
- To foster the
application of design as a key element in the development of an internationally
competitive manufacturing base, in the development of efficient service
industries and in the creation and maintenance of quality environments.
- To promote
excellence in design.
- To develop in
Australia
a deeper understanding of the nature of design and design processes and the
value of design.
- To realise a
national influence and purpose for design.
- To contribute
to the development of an Australian design ethic.
- To advise
Government on matters relating to design.
- To initiate,
coordinate and conduct studies in relation to design.
- To represent
the full interests of design in Australia.
Each one of these statements, however, carries
significant implications not only for Australian design educators but for
design educators everywhere in the world for they imply values and attributes
for design which are universally relevant. The urgency with which these aims
and objectives are stated also suggests that, in spite of die popular appeal
accorded to design activity, certainly in this affluent Western nation of
conspicuous consumption, there is an underlying perception that all is not well
and that design and designers are by no means in control of the purposes to
which their skills and imagination are put.
Consciousness raising about design
Whether or not this new body sees itself as primarily
involved with an educational mission all of its less obvious economic or
instrumental objectives go to the core of every citizen's understanding of what
constitutes creative, productive and humanly rewarding labour. In order to
realise a national influence and purpose for design, it must surely embrace the
concerns of the users of other peoples design decisions, or the lack of them,
as well as those who make the decisions. The them and us situation
which has characterised the relationship between designers and non-designers,
or that of the professional design practitioner specialisms and their clients
or consumers is clearly one of the entrenched impediments to open understanding
of design that must be addressed.
A bold and hopeful feature of the new Academy which
may help address this lack of openness and raise consciousness among
practitioners themselves is its decision to invite membership from
distinguished practitioners from every field of design. Divisiveness exists even
among specialist areas of many modern technological professions in the same
discipline. Engineering, like Design has long exhibited this enclave mentality
so that if this ambitious program of consciousness raising and the forging of a
common creative purpose succeeds within the diverse ranks of the professional
practitioners, perhaps design as a creative activity will be demystified and
made more transparent and accessible to the society at large.
Design advocacy to government
At the political level in the places where decisions
are made which affect the well being of every person, the creation of a
unified, coherent and informed voice for and about design has much to recommend
it as a strategy for consciousness raising. Clearly this bold attempt to unify
the currently disparate, often confusing and frequently competitive forms of
design advocacy through creating a common ground for design practitioners
deserves support.
There can be little doubt that the creative energy of
design and its skillful application towards the creation of a better society
has not been articulated in clear ways to those people in charge of governing
society. The past failure to decisively influence the Board Rooms of industrial
or commercial enterprises towards better design practice also stems from ibis
lack of clarity and the conflicting forms of design advocacy from the design
practitioners themselves. These are also educational issues of the greatest
importance.
Design in the popular culture
Australians like the citizens of the other advanced
Western nations have succumbed to the seductive popular exploitation of design
through the massive interventions of the media in the service of the market
economy. Design, in this context, has reached cult status since the 1970's when
«designer jeans» first heralded the creation of the designer as hero and
heroine rivalling the cult of personalities that feeds the entertainment
industry in the Western cultures.
Design has become familiar to the population at large
but its appropriation merely as a symbol of modernity and as a vehicle chiefly
to cultivate community desire for more and more products has further clouded
the way for the design advocate as educator. Perhaps the Academy's slated aim
to contribute to the development of an Australian design ethic goes to this
issue. What constitutes design ethics - how are they to be taught?
Design as a symbol of modernity
Design as a symbol of modernity has even greater
implications in global terms. Those emergent nations which have been so long held
in a state of total dependence on the Western technocracies see design, as
expressed in the forms of desirable but largely unattainable or unaffordable
consumer products, as the ultimate reality of modernity. It is already sweeping
away much of their indigenous cultural inventory based on centuries of
development of functional, culturally laden artefacts which may have been by
far the better models upon which a modern and more efficient technologically
advanced, productive culture could be developed.
How will the design educators in these places deal
with these distortions of the meaning and purposes of design. Should design
ethics he centrally concerned with these serious issues and, if so, this is but
a further burden and a challenge facing design education.
Demystification of design process
and product
The need to demonstrate that design is a holistic,
interdisciplinary and indivisible creative activity, characterises the work of
our best design educators but the distortive popularisation of design and its
inevitable association with the notion of technological and economic success
makes this articulation of the human value of appropriate design practice
increasingly difficult to sustain.
There is a tendency, in the interests of
clarification, for some educators to over simplify the meaning and purpose of
the activity. This is encapsulated by descriptions of the creative processes of
design as being «ordinary human capabilities of mind» or in the catchy phrase
«everyone is a designers. We, the cognoscenti, know what is the intention
of these explanations but, in the face of the current connotation of design in
the popular mass media which has now been attached to such things as designer
drugs and, more recently, designer sex, there is a greater danger that such
simplifications may serve to further trivialise the design activity.
In the competitive environment, which is the domain of
the school curriculum, design may be seen as another attempt to burden the
teacher and the pupil with yet another critical, urgent parcel of learning at a
time when our education systems are reeling from the imposition of more and
more demands for specific and largely «technologically imperative» subject
areas.
As a counter to this objection the idea of progressing
design education in our schools as a holistic, across the curriculum experience
holds some merit and attraction. The danger here is the inherent territorialism
of die core curriculum which could see design being appropriated in highly
selective ways to underpin, to cosmeticise or merely make more palatable other
«required» subject areas.
Design professional versus design
educational activity
Teachers in general education are judged by the
community at large, by results. In the drive to develop effective and
assessable curriculum outcomes that may be judged by the community at large as
client, design is vulnerable to the intervention of the outwardly attractive
exemplars of professional design activity. Product rather than process tends to
influence the construct of many current design programs in schools.
Given that the design professions themselves have not
been able to articulate a coherent view of what constitutes desirable design
practice the recruitment into primary and secondary schools of «real»
designers, meaning successful design practitioners is also problematical for
design educators in general education.
Already Australian schools of design in the
professional or higher education sector have experienced the effects of these
quasi-professional interventions in secondary schools where young people are
completing their academic preparations for admission to higher studies. Whilst
clearly possessing basic skills and creative capabilities in the visual and
operational arts their conceptual view of the activity of design has already
been narrowly channelled by the given exemplars of professional design. That is
not to say they have been exposed to bad design perse but that, in
general, the design experience has been highly instrumental, usually
professionally sophisticated and given in isolation from all other kinds of
creative and exploratory design activities.
The models, the exercises they have undertaken are
invariably highly specific professional design works superficially attractive
and undeniably technically proficient. Getting these young people to explore,
to challenge and to discover the wider horizons of design activity offered in
the foundation programs of well constructed university design education is a
difficult task requiring time consuming but necessary remedial work.
«Designers in Schools» as these programs are called
may well create more problems for dedicated design educators than they solve
and clearly the gap between design as education and design in its present
professional form and purpose needs to be addressed.
Other interventions in design
education
In Australia the latest «buzz-word» to describe the
process of restoring value to the products of the industrialised world is that
of quality or, more fully. «Total Quality Managements».
The most visible aspect of the cultural inventory of
any nation resides, not merely in those artistic and creative activities
institutionalised in the prestigious art galleries and museums, or in its
literature or in its sciences but in the work its people do, in the things they
make, in the man-made environments they build. In short in the quality and
humanly appropriate aspects of their daily lived-in experience.
It follows that the most important and life-long
contribution every person makes to their society should be the work that they
do but those charged with the educational preparation of our young people for
the past two hundred years have increasingly emphasised the economic functions
involved in education for survival. This in turn has led to the pursuit of
economic development and production which has served chiefly to lead our
society into a condition of widespread social disfunction, it has not created a
human quality of amenity.
The charge on falling quality standards is similarly
focused on purely economic factors but not the connection between the cultural
significance of the work that people do and the meaning and value of that work.
This is the proper domain of design but it plays little part in the politically
endorsed strategies aimed at restoring quality in the arts of manufacture. Here
is yet another dimension to what might also constitute a significant element of
appropriate design education and it is a problem which needs to be focused on
the creatively human, rather than only the means of creating valued products as
economic and technological imperatives.
Consumer activism
Another intervention which now impinges on basic
issues of design education is the concern for consumers rights which like the
Green Revolution, sprang from citizen activist groups. Inevitably, the thrust
of this movement, which has already invaded the crowded curriculum space of our
schools, focuses primarily on the economic factor, not on the basic factors if
providing appropriate human amenity.
To be sure there is merit in preparing our young
people for survival in the financial and economic jungle of adult life in our
culture but no popular consumer magazine yet published has seen fit to fully
acknowledge the key role of design in the achievement of real quality and real
value in the products and services of our technological society.
Today our vaunted technological civilisation is
hostage to its own man-made crises but for all its apparent material success
and prosperity it is rapidly becoming a humanly uninteresting civilization for
the majority of its inhabitants.
The world as a whole, the South as well as the North,
the democratic, as well as the authoritarian regimes is still bent on
increasing industrialisation, production, economic efficiency and wealth
creation in strictly material terms.
Design as a way of thinking about
and acting upon the world
When asked by the media why the creation of the
Australian Academy of Design should be seen as a significant event its first
President responded in a way which some might say adds yet another definition
of design to an already overloaded menu. He said: «Everything that does not
happen by accident happens by design.» We designers, of course, know what he
meant even without the elaboration of that remark which surely followed but was
probably not published.
Taken too literally such a definition suggests that
every outcome of human creative activity should be attributed to Design. This
is dangerous stuff in the highly competitive and politically charged
environment of the school staff room.
Design educators will acknowledge the potentially
important contribution that this new Australian design initiative can make
through the pursuit of its objectives which reflect, I believe, a universality
of concerns that we can all relate to.
The problems it identifies also provides a timely
reminder of the need for Design, with a capital «D» to find more effective and
more socially relevant ways to articulate its position. It is time that we, in
design education, gave more attention to building and then communicating the
proper knowledge base of the discipline for there is no other area of human
endeavour and creative power which is as important as design that has so
gravely neglected its responsibility to earn the scholarly regard so central to
its achieving its rightful place within the «Core» curriculum of our primary
and secondary schools.
Until that happens, its place within the higher levels
of education, in our University system and in the body politic at large, its
key role as a creative strategy, a creative agent of change in the pursuit of a
more human and genuinely productive society will not be achieved.
The creative synergy of design
activity
In conclusion we should reflect on the potential of
design as education in helping do away with the harmful separation between
theoretical and practical knowledge which begins so early in our formal
education systems. The malaise of modern technological society stems largely
from the distortions created by the economic and technological imperatives that
have been allowed to shape the material culture.
We need to re-connect our young people to the human
dimension of the making of the material culture, to help give them power over
the technological and economic means of constructing a society that is both
humanly satisfying and humanly interesting.
The dominant models of the design activity which, thus
far, have characterised the «successful outcomes» of design application in the
technological culture have been those of products and product systems which
have become mere symbols of modernity. The connection of too many of these
things to the daily lived-in lives of ordinary people is not one of true human
amenity but diversionary and ephemeral chiefly directed at satisfying immediate
wants and not human needs. The political educational expediency of promoting
design capability in the same context of the narrow economic imperatives that
has been allowed to determine which knowledge is most worth in much of our
curriculum at all levels needs to be resisted. This is a great problem for
dedicated design educators in the face of the popular and seductive images of
design as a symbol of modernity.
Although it has not been articulated in so many words,
the creation of a membership structure for the Australian Academy
of Design made up of distinguished practitioners from fields of work which
rarely communicate one with the other, suggests that the
traninstitutionalisation of design practice is a prime objective. In that
sense, its outcomes may, indeed, become a new form of collective art.
A new movement of collective art which reflects the
spirit of the modem age can only be made by a body of creative people who, by
association and through a shared concern for the quality of human life can
respond to the needs of the world of human affairs with their senses in a
meaningful, imaginative, skilful, technologically and scientifically
appropriate, humanly productive and co-operative way.
For those whose skills lie specifically in the
transformation of products and product systems which rest on the application of
scientific and technological knowledge, this means giving a new dimension to
the meaning of «the Arts of Manufacturer, to Architecture and the «Built
Environment».
In the first year of life of the new Academy that task
of re-connecting will, in itself, be a re-education process as each of the
participants, irrespective of their pre-eminence as expert design
practitioners, surrenders their professional design territory to help build and
then articulate and demonstrate a truly holistic «Across the Curriculum» design
strategy, to design and secure, the future of Design.
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Sobre l'autor
TONY RUSSELL
Professor i Cap de Disseny
a The Curtin University of Technology, a l'Austràlia Occidental. Ha estat
membre fundador de l'Australian Academy of Design.
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