Persistent Conversation on Design Education
From Design Education in iSchools
Welcome to the page for facilitating the persistent conversation about design education.
We hope that people will add their own design stories, reflections, etc. to this page to continue the discussion.
Links related to teaching design:
- Problems Teaching Design - This is a page for bringing up problems people typically face teaching design to their students, and for us to have a discussion about strategies to address those problems.
- Persistent Conversation on Design Education - This is a page for more general conversations about design education.
- We will also be discussing things on the google group:
Please feel free to add your own sections on this page, and to create links from this page to new pages that you have created for longer stories or conversations.
Contents |
Reflection on the iConference 2008 Wildcard Session
Ingbert's Perspective
The wildcard session went quite well, at least from the perspective of the four of us who ran it. Thus, if you were a participant, and had a different impression, we'd love to hear from you! What follows is my (Ingbert Floyd's) perspective. While what I write is primarily a rehash of what happened in the small group session for the benefit of the people who could not attend, I will focus on the seeming consensus, and what I got out of attending it. This will be followed by a new section which is for everybody to contribute to: a list of take-home messages and ideas from the wildcard. Please respond, criticize, disagree, disabuse, etc. to all of this, if you are so inclined.
In the wildcard session, we pretty much followed the schedule as presented in the wiki: 30 minute intro and brainstorming discussion topics, followed by 30 minutes of small group discussions, and then 30 minutes of large group wrap-up. We ended up only splitting into two small groups, which meant that the groups were a bit large. I didn't get a very thorough sense of what the other group talked about, so I'll focus most of my comments about the group I joined (participants: Stephen Hirtle, Larry Dennis, Robert Heckman, Ping Zhang, Karen Baker (other page), M. Cameron Jones) and capture my understanding of the wrap-up session at the end in the take-home messages section.
One of the major themes that emerged from the group discussion I was a part of was the fundamentally sociotechnical nature of design, and how recognizing this is vital for doing design well. Clearly, this was in part a function of the people who decided to join our group, since the other group's discussions seemed to be an exchange of different perceptions of design, including art, computer science, and industrial perspectives in addition to the sociotechnical one (this is unlikely to be an exhaustive list). Most participants in our group had experience working on scientific collaboratories and cyberinfrastructure. However, I don't think it was accidental. Nearly every member of our group had a story to tell about their experiences with design, and the messes that happened due to various sociotechnical factors. Thus, they felt that incorporating a true sociotechnical perspective into design education was of fundamental necessity.
This discussion led us to the definitional question: What is design? We had no quick answer to this. Ping Zhang proposed an account where she thought that design could be characterized in terms of fundamental human goals. I wish I could remember her list, but it was something like, the desire for power, the desire for ... (simplicity, maybe?), etc. She thought that all the concerns we needed to address when doing the design could be characterized in such terms. Others seemed to be looking for a different kind of characterization of design, something that could identify what about it was important, and how design, when practiced professionally, served to improve the quality of built systems and processes.
One thing we seemed to agree upon was that design(-like) activity is present in a vast number of every-day activities, everything from the decisions we make when writing a paper to how we structure a syllabus. In my view, this meant that the important question was not how do people do design, or what constitutes design and design behavior (beyond an simple description to articulate the focus of the discussion). Rather, the important question is what does design as an intentional perspective bring to these activities, how are they done better when a design perspective is adopted. Others, I think, felt that calling activities design which were not cases of intentional design was a misuse of the term, and that we should define design in terms of intentionality. (Intentionality may not be the right word here.)
We still did not have satisfactory answers to these and other questions which were raised in our discussion when it was time to go back to the large-group discussion. However, for me, at least, it was nice to see the general level of consensus that we had reached, both on some aspects of design that were raised, and on the questions which were important.
The wrap-up session was interesting as well, but instead of reviewing the conversation that happened there, I think it will be more productive to just present some of the take-home ideas and messages that seemed to emerge from the wildcard as a whole. In that section, I will also present some ideas that emerged from follow-up discussions I had with Larry Dennis and Jillian Wallis.
Take-home Ideas
- Design is fundamentally sociotechnical in nature.
- This realization is one of the most important lessons to teach in our design and design-related courses.
- This may be one of the contributions an iSchool "accent" on design can provide.
- It is unclear whether design should be taught in a "pure" design course; nobody I encountered had such a course at their school, but almost everybody taught design as part of other courses, and everybody seemed to think this was valuable.
- It seems valuable to include design thinking in courses that are not obviously related to design. To use UIUC's GSLIS as an example, it should not just be taught in classes like Systems Analysis, CSCW, Rapid Prototyping and Evaluation, Interfaces to Information Systems, etc., but also in classes like Information Organization, Use and Users of Information, etc.
- Defining design is important, but perhaps not in the particulars.
- Certainly there seems to be consistency between the activities of fields as diverse as LIS, Urban Planning, Industrial Engineering, Architecture, Computer Science, Art, and others. Having a general account for what this is would be nice, but it will have to include artifact-centric design, process-centric design, systems-centric design, and experience-centric design (and probably others). Thus defining design in terms of its object is probably not the way to go.
- Furthermore, not only is there consistency between these fields, but the intentional design these field practice seems to produce much better results than the amateur activities which every individual engages in on a daily basis. For this reason, a question that may be more important than "what is design?" or "how do we define design?" is "what does professional design buy us when we engage in it? what does it have to offer?" There are several possible answers to this, all of which probably have some merit:
- The act of focusing on design brings attention to the activities, a consideration of the consequences of the activities, and visibility to the importance of the activities.
- The study of design allows us to improve our design methods, so that we are better able to conduct design, be more aware of what the possible consequences of our actions/decisions are, follow patterns of behavior that are more likely to uncover problems early in the process when it is much easier (or simply possible) to fix them.
- Others?
- Maybe, then the best way to ask this question is, what is the essence of design? We seem to know what it means intuitively, but it is hard to articulate.
- And of course the related issue: what kind of description of this essence are we looking for?
- Integrating different disciplinary perspectives of design is very important.
- For example, most of the design disciplines we typically look to are purpose-driven. Thus, the major metric of success is, does my design accomplish the purpose for which I created it? However, art is an exception to this rule. The evaluation criteria for art is not, "did I achieve my goal?", but rather, "what are the effects of my creation?" (I, Ingbert, may have mischaracterized this - I'm the least artistic one of the conference organizers). In the wildcard session, this led to the suggestion that one method for catching unintended consequences of design work would be to create an evaluation technique where the goal-driven success metric is occluded, and instead the design is evaluated as an art piece.
This is all I can think of for now. Please add stuff to this list.
Notes from the iConference 2008 Wildcard
What follows are a series of notes we took about the wildcard session; hopefully they will be useful to somebody.
Written Notes 1
[Lines are page breaks; written order unclear]
Designing What
- Presentation and Representation
- Designing w/o knowing it
- Large scale systems
- Toolkits of Design
- Design when?
- Worry about it later
- Transform non-designers into designers
Robin Williams - Book
- Graphical Design for Nondesigners
- Create for others
- Communication
- Design as communication
- Design is a deep concept
- underscores everything we do
- e.g.: writing a paper involves design
- Components of Design
- Lab to --> "Design Studio"
- Design (then lines to:)
- Boundary Objects
- Artifacts
- Engagement
- Concepts
What can design buy you?
- What does design perspective offer?
- Methods
- Visibility [circled]
Written Notes 2
[Double lines are page breaks, written order unclear; single lines are written in notes, but shorter than they appear here]
- Design has engineering
- Design has creative
- 1 & 2 above: composition [this is a recreation of what was written graphically]
- others?
^ | | But these are the iSchool part
Product Design --> User Experience
- ^
- |
- |
- mediation as
The role for information science?
Responses to can't
- program
- draw
collaboration classes
- media/stats/CS --> DB aesthetics
task design not the syllabus
- or course ... building from
design cases / each department
required different [not sure the next word:] dnlcocrably
structuring and organizing the class
procedural design?
creative design?
Systems Development life cycle
- Design --> Co-design
Managing ambiguity as
- design practices and where
- it has to relate...
Visual analysis in an applied context ----
Design != Aesthetics
but they do interact
Culturally determined design
Institutionally and
Disciplinarily defined design
- community contextualized
reflexivity - in the iSchools and the arts
Systems of value - Exhibitions
- what design activities have value?
Design vs. Art vs. Information D
- vs. Information Sciences
Post-facto (Evaluation perspectives)
- do it in CS design
- compared to studio art
Product design (engineering)
called design --> but is evaluation
Respect and appreciation for
Design in some contexts
- focus on design (build w/ human focus)
- Design (look at context)
Some Notecards Written During the Session
Here is a partial collection of the notecards that were written during the session. They have been distributed around the country since the conference, as different organizers picked up different piles.
- "Universals" in Design
- Design as Value
- Design of Organizations, Processes, Services
- Socio-technical Design (on same card)
- Designing What?
- Making Design Visible as Essential to Development
- [...]
Some Notecards Written in Prep for the Session
Again, not all of them (by far), but the ones I have access to right now.
- Engagement in Design
- Recognition of the Fundamental Sociotechnical Nature of Design
- Written to be read, rather than written to be run.
Related Links
- Design Education in iSchools Home Page
- Design Methods
- Collaborative Design Bibliography
- Persistent Conversation on Design Education
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