I’ve been following the BBCs “Design for life” series with Philip Starck recently, whether you think Starck is an intellectual giant of the design world or a complete mad man, what the program did for me was to highlight some shortcomings in British design education, and I blame education purely because all of the young hopefuls where fresh out of university and could have only formed their view of the design process from their lecturers on the courses they studied.
Whilst I appreciate we only seen the edited highlights, I was disappointed in the lack of creativity shown by the group, for me design is about asking questions and questioning everything and only when all the questions have been asked does the designer then attempt to put forward proposals (plural) for a solution to the problem.
Every one of the contestants said they were problem solvers, yet each time they presented to Starck they presented only one idea/solution which in some cases was their first and only, which is fine if it is the optimal solution, however you wouldn’t know that until you have explored significant others. I was horrified that they all turned up for a critique with only one formalized idea, It was a good job they weren’t presenting to Alastair Hamilton, VP Design at Symbol Technologies who says
….a designer that pitched 3 ideas would probably be fired, I’d say 5 is an entry point for an early formal review (distilled from 100s), if you are pushing one you will be found out, and also fired, it is about open mindedness, humility, discovery and learning, if you aren’t authentically dedicated to that approach you are just doing it wrong.
I didn’t see many of these traits in the contestants, so are we spending too much time learning how to be digital and not enough time on the design process through sketching (not drawing) and ideation.
Do we need to get back to the basics of what design is which for me is “giving choices” to the client/society? I wonder if this is what industry means when they say they ‘teach students old school skill’s.
Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research sums it up nicely by saying..
…. It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea as it does to have it in the first place and it takes even more creativity to bring that idea into practice.
Could be a discussion for open09
The future of product design is digital
Digital design has had a profound effect on the product designer. Whether this is through how we design, or what we design. Are we at risk of just becoming ‘box’ designers, making containers for digital information, where the content becomes the arbiter of whether the product is accepted or rejected by a fickle consumer market? Is the product becoming invisible, or are we, more than ever than before, staring at a profound opportunity to let the work of the product designer shape and affect users lives?
Tempering all of this is of course the debate around disposable technology and the speed of new product development and a market hungry for the ‘next big thing’.
Meanwhile, as educators we are constantly being told by the ‘industry’, we need to teach our students ‘old school skills’. How do we balance the traditional approach to design education, with a customer base that has grown up in and aspires to the digital future?
posted by: rob rigby - view / reply
posted by: Ken Rigby - view / reply
At the moment there remains a need to travel to conferences. While they are useful, the level of interaction in text based chat rooms is of a very low order, and massively stretched over time, compared with f2f meetings. However, the technology improves all the time, and I find myself quite often having small interactions with a few people online through Skype and iChat. No doubt these tools will improve as the need for, and ethics of, travel declines in the future. This conference is of course an attempt to produce a model of online interaction beyond the 'flesh' meetings, and its success in so doing will no doubt be analysed after the event. I applaud the organisers in experimenting in this way, and adding to our knowledge.
posted by: David Durling - view / reply
posted by: rob rigby - view / reply
Id like to throw something in here, and that is connectivity of human interaction that creates things like "trust" "honesty" "expression"
In a way one does not replace the other. Its useful to have a conversation over skype because it satisfies a need and the context.
i think we need to have that conversation on where these technologies are best applied rather than a generic solution.
posted by: simon robertshaw - view / reply