Andy Polaine | The Paradox of Design Education

The Paradox of Design Education | 设计教育的悖论

In the upcoming October’s Engage with Ideas talk, Andy Polaine will revisit his 2011 article titled Design Research – A Failure of Imagination? The article was presented as a keynote at the first international Design Research Society’s Special Interest Group on Design Pedagogy conference, co-organised with Cumulus and held in Paris. The event was hosted in the historical Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

The central theme of Andy’s keynote article was outlining negative impact of fragmentation between how design practice, design theory and design methods were taught in design education. He argued that the friction, caused by the fragmentation, is prohibiting future designers to integrate research into their design practices, which in turn makes it difficult to interrogate the design process. Therefore, he asserted that designers are resorted to propagating the myth of a creative genius by selling what they do as magic (Kolko, 2011), which in turn, makes the design process hidden. The failure of articulating the design process keeps designers to be regarded as stylist and it also makes the design field to be perceived as non-academic which in turn limits the design academics ability to attract research funding needed to place it on the same academic standing as of science subjects.

He lamented that design educators and professionals failed to make a case that skills central to design such as design thinking are also crucial skills for everyone else. Scholars promoting design literary equally argue that citizens should have design literacies to enable them to navigate and to be able to participate in today’s predominantly artificial world (Bravo et al., 2022).
To remedy the situation, he suggested, that design educators, commercial designers and design researches should build on each other knowledges to facilitate development of more explicit descriptions of thinking processes guiding design practice.

Dr. Andy Polaine is a design leadership coach, educator, and writer who helps clients build and grow their own design and innovation capability, transform their organisations and themselves. For several years he worked at Fjord where he was global Group Design Director of Client Evolution. He is co-author of the Rosenfeld Media book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, now a standard text for Service Design. Andy has nearly three decades of experience in design and innovation with clients across a range of industries, including financial services, public services, life sciences, telecommunications, automotive, media, design and education. He holds a PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney and teaches on the MA Service Design at the Hochschule Luzern, Switzerland. He can be found online at polaine.com, as @apolaine on Mastodon, Twitter as @apolaine. He writes a popular newsletter called Doctor’s Note and hosts the Power of Ten podcast, and shares his design leadership tips on his YouTube channel.

References

Bravo, Úrsula, Nielsen, Liv Merete, Lutnæs, Eva, Bohemia, Erik & Börekçi, Naz A G Z. 2022. Editorial: Design Literacies: pasts, presents, and possible futures. In: Lockton, Dan; Lenzi, Sara; Hekkert, Paul; Oak, A; Sádaba, J; Lloyd, Peter, eds. DRS2022: Bilbao. Design Research Society, pp. 1–8. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2022/editorials/14/

Kolko, Jon. 2011 [2010]. Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744336.001.0001/acprof-9780199744336.

Polaine, Andrew. 2011. Design Research – A Failure of Imagination?. In: Bohemia, Erik; Borja de Mozota, Brigitte; Collina, Luisa, eds. Researching Design Education: 1st International Symposium for Design Education Researchers. La Bourse du Commerce, Paris, France: CUMULUS ASSOCIATION and DRS, pp. 41–51. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046&context=conference-volumes