Question Submission
That's why Design and business are not the same thing - that's why Nussbaum is *wrong* when he talks about how Design is the same as innovation.
Design doesn't have to exist in a business context.
It would be good to have the speakers' slides on this wiki. Is this possible?
we will work on it as long as panelists have no problem
Education is a business, yes, and universities do of course engage the same sorts of strategies as any business might to build their offerings.
(A nice read on this topic is Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education by David L. Karp . . . it'd be interesting to have a sequel about design education in these times).
Design education is today, I think, torn about how to educate in what were always considered basic skills in particular design fields. For one thing, changes in media and technology have changed that skill set. For another, the relationship between formerly isolated disciplines have changed and disciplines now find themselves overlapping and in need of reformulation. This produces a lot of retrenching as well as a lot of innovative new approaches to design education.
Further, the types of problems we face today are very complicated and the solutions to them require cross-disciplinary inquiry and engagement. Design schools are not often well situated for this because - aside from any philosophical or pedagogical issues with cross-disciplinarity - many exist either on their own or in professional school silos within larger universities.
Also, while I agree there is risk aversion - I'm not sure it's particularly recent. But I am rather new to design education and could use some enlightenment. . . I'd say that the structure of the academy often creates a belatedness or lag in relation to popular phenomena caused in part by the breadth/depth of projects (vs. the superficiality of research projects in business which are necessarily tied to the strategic plans of any given fiscal year) and by the publishing lifecycle. It appears to me that it is not so much risk aversion, in design education, as perhaps the difficulty of connecting industry issues and lifecycles to academic ones. For instance, it is difficult for many design programs to integrate education in the business of design. This is partly a philosophical issue - many design educators tout the value of what they believe to be completely “exploratory” or “experimental” design vs. that limited forms of design produced when you include the “constraints” of particular markets, industires, busienss/technical/user requirements. The thinking here is that there will be some sort of innovation or insight produced by design that is IMAGINED to be free of constraints or is unfettered by a need for really good social research to frame the inital starting point for a problem. The risk aversion here is born of a (romantic) commitment to a 'limit-free' condition for creativity (although, of course, scholars of romanticism point to the agonistic struggles against precursors and this should warn us that this form of risk aversion is somewhat naive/inauthentic). Perhaps part of this legacy has to do with the “art education” approach to all art/design education . . . and the aversion to industry practice naturally arises from this . . . as does the dis-ease of designers with their (necessary) employment in industry contexts that constain them.
Aside from the philosophical issue (or what poses as such) it appears to me that this is simply a matter of experience. Many full-time design educators do not have much experience (or contemporary experience) working in contexts in which they were accountable to the sorts of constraints that scare them (e.g., the constraints of a business model; the constraints of the economic and cultural conditions of a particular group of people; etc.). The 'risk aversion' is not about big business here but a product of a real lack of experience working in the contexts in which their students will earn their living.
But, back to whether or not big business is risk averse . . . businesses spend a great deal of time trying to innovate in order to compete. Sometimes, they approach this as innovation at the level of new products. Or services. Or business models. It has been argued that businesses are not always run in a fashion that encourages thinking about changes in business models . . . and that the focus on “new products” leads to lots of new product failures and less competitive offerings/businesses. Doblin has argued that design contributes greatly to educating businesses about the broader innovation arenas that include new business models. IDEO, I believe, is very much involved in thinking about organization design and how to work on this design to increase the opportunities for innovation. Design Education could learn a lesson from these folks . . .
But I digress . . .
Design education IS big business. It's totally risk averse; it's about money, just like enterprise.
Isnt it ONLY Design that HAS ethics?
That you ask the question is fairly telling. Design exists in culture. You need to understand - and empathize - with the culture.
Empathy comes from experience!
Design is not a thing, it is a process. In Bill’s talk earlier, he showed the video about the creation of the drop-down menu system at Apple and that it did not come from one night of creativity but was a result of many weeks of a process.
So if it is not a thing, it cannot be alive or dead. One piece can be dead or alive or more alive and what we see in tech is the process of design which is half-alive. So I guess this isn’t a question but more of a point. We’re all Design Zombies. We walk and eat brains but we aren’t alive because part or parts of our process is dead.
No - just because you use the word, doesn't make it true. They don't use abductive thinking, and they don't follow an iterative process, and they don't prototype, test, fail, and revisit the ideas.
They do dress nicely, though
Defined: Design is the creation of a representational dialogue between a person and an artifact (product, service, system, etc).
bill distinguishes thoughful design vs. thoughtless design. introspective v. expedient.
Terry mentioned that design is learning by doing……but doing always has to be preceeded by thought/thinking…..so where does thinking stop and doing take over, in the design context?