I think that this is why...
It has become quite clear that we have entered an age where it is imperative to share and manage resources across broad constituencies requiring new models for organization, cooperation, and the evaluation of the systems that support it. The opportunity to discuss one such model today may give us insight into the complexities of tomorrow.
That was a short blurb I wrote for our WorldBlu conference last year. I still believe it.
Recently, Bruce Nussbaum hosted a discussion with Anne Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The question; Is Design Too Important To Be Left Only To Designers? I am still having trouble deciding whether I find the discussion meaningful teaching point or vapid disregard for education. Nevetheless I bit and responded to his piece about the discussion on his blog;
Nussbaum on Design.
You can read my response after the jump. Also take a look at a prior discussion on the topic that I co-hosted at
CHI in 2007. The documentation from the panel can be found at,
Who Killed Design?.
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Bruce,
Before I tell you whether 'design' will happen without 'designers', you've got to tell me what a 'designer' is.
I find it frustrating that anyone would point a finger at 'MIT Physics' as being a group of 'non-designers'. Aside from the fact that the example is low-hanging fruit, a pure physics student is relatively hard to find amongst the staggering array of disciplines on campus there. Moreover, the physics department has happily co-existed with MIT's very successful design and design-focused programs longer than many school's of design have existed.
MIT and schools like it have been home to strategists, scientists, and and general 'makers of things' since long before any of the proponents of design-geist were born.
But rather than wax further about how MIT is a Design School (I actually attended Harvard so color me green with envy), I would like to argue that the distinction of 'designer' is doing more to hurt the future of the global Academy of Design than any copyist or opportunist ever could.
As this regards theory, I would imagine that there is something to be said for the prolific discourse occurring in the practices, but I think that it is a dangerous and all-together limiting assumption that practitioners who own firms and publish books have anything more than the capacity and means to make and sell products. If we buy these products, does that make them 'good' {designers, theorists, teachers, even writers}? ... and is the future of 'good' design about making more products or limiting the impact of the products we've already made?
For anyone to suggest that 'designers' don't participate in the 'design process', and won't in the future, reveals a rather limited understanding of what Design is and a myopic sense of what it will be. I would be suspect of any practitioner who claims to have enough time to run a successful firm of any kind while also writing and publishing the last words on design - most of all architects. Unless, we assume that they are not that involved in either A. their writing or B. their practice. Most troubling about this discussion though is the willful disregard of the role that pedagogy has to play in the development of a thoughtful practitioner of anything. Are we to think that the superstars of the world will actually open their doors (jet, limo, or pied-a-terre) to masses of would-be students? That vision of the great-one teaching and fostering their apprentices was always a fairy-tale - one that has crushed many an intern into submission and a fallacy even when it was assumed to be a rite of passage in ancient greece.
I would hope that the future is not manifest by mere self-validation. Though sometimes an aggressive and messy transaction, discourse between those who 'make things' and those who discuss that which is made is a necessary part of society. Every evening and Sunday morning we have a slew of people who are paid quite well to do so.
But it is fun to imagine - next we should discuss journalism without journalists, law without legislators, governing without government, medicine without doctors, and of course - utopia without utopians. Thanks for keeping us on our toes Bruce.
Respectfully,
Scott G. Pobiner
Assistant Professor
Parsons The New School for Design
