The Future of Design Education
Terry Winograd
Global things to fix:
More storytelling to replace abstractions
More on value for society, innovation, etc.
For the past couple of years I’ve been part of an exciting design experiment. Along with other faculty, staff, and students at Stanford, we’ve been creating and learning about new forms of design education. In the spirit of design through iterative prototyping, we still don’t knowwhere we’re going. There are no specific plans for a degree program, no curriculum, and no formal structure. Instead, we’ve created a series of courses, related in spirit but very different in detail, to get a better understanding of what can be done with “design thinking” and how we can create a design thinking capacity in students from many different backgrounds.
What is Design Thinking?
From time to time, someone asks me “What do you really mean by ‘design thinking’?” and I find myself at a loss for a clear crisp definition. ….
First, the word “design” is dangerous. For many people, it brings to mind fashion design, interior design, and the whole world of skilled artists who create objects of beauty, and often luxury, as in a “designer dress.” My view is closer to the one articulated by Herbert Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial, (1969) ”...Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. … Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences. Schools of engineering, as well as schools of architecture, business, education, law, and medicine, are all centrally concerned with the process of design.”
Design in this expanded sense is not preoccupied with aesthetic form (although form can be important), but with “changing existing situations into preferred ones.” This is a tall order, and there have been decades (if not centuries) of discourse on how best to achieve it. In our explorations at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford (known as the “d.school”), we have drawn on a philosophy and practical approach that was developed … Design Division .. Product Design program .. McKim … IDEO (see the books by Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman, The Art of Innovationand The Ten Faces of Innovation).
In my own field of human-computer interaction, we have seen the emergence of .. interaction design .. Bringing Design to Software … Bill Moggridge, Designing interactions .. focus on experience .. Don Norman …
What do we need to teach?
Design thinking is .. a way of tackling problems and opportunities… In our thinking about our program we often talk about the importance of students developing a “T-shape” competence. The vertical stem is a deep analytic knowledge of a relevant discipline (in our case, engineering, business, computing, management, education, etc.). The horizontal top is the integrative understanding of how to incorporate deep knowledge and skills into a way of doing – design is ultimately about doing. The traditional skills taught at design schools, such as visual design, architecture, and .. are further pillars, with a different kind of learning from engineering and other traditional disciplines. They depend not so much on a complex edifice of articulated knowledge, but on deep experience and skill, developed through a studio education.
Design thinking education values and builds on the strength of these other styles of education that create the pillars. Its focus is on bringing together knowledge, understanding, and innovation. The future of design education requires several key elements:
Design for user needs
Design in context vs. design as object … economic and social context…people who wouldn’t normally be associated with design schools, but more with business, management, and social …. Patell India, Myanmar …
Collaboration across multiple perspectives and expertise
…departments in universities … traditional design disciplines .. collaboration vs. individual stars .. difficulties … consciousness about process … d.shrink
Learning by engagement with people and their world
Big projects…. Prototyping… "enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects." .. bicycle safety project….Entrepreneurship … Sutton courses .. Mozilla Foundation, Fidelity, Walmart,
Who do we want to teach?
With this expansive view of design, we are clearly looking beyond the education of specialized designers, to the development of design thinking capacities for everyone engaged in “changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
A widebreadth of students (mostly Masters level, from a dozen departments) have takend.school courses. They ….
This past summer 30 PhD students from 18 different departments as diverse as Aeronautics, Computer Science, Developmental Biology, Political Science, and Spanishtook time out of their highly specialized academic research for a weeklong experience in design. They … .fruit…valuable to their lives.(quote from evaluations?)
Along with this breadth, we want to train a more specialized group with expert skills in design thinking who can serve as coaches in future environments and teams in industry, education, and other walks of life. They will be design teachers, whether in formal faculty positions or informal leadership roles, who make it possible for the values …
Where?
I have written about my own experience at the d.school, but this is only one of a number of schools that are developing design thinking education, both in existing design schools such as The Institute of Design at IIT … , new media schools such as The School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, business schools, such as the Rotman School of Management, and interdisciplinary programs in design and computing, such as those at Carnegie Mellon University.
As these and other programs develop, “design” will no longer be a specialized area for those “artistically inclined” but a way of thinking that is learned by a wide range of students and will permeate…