Hej Martin, Hi Don....
I would hate to be submidded to Don's preference for teaching a person with "..a penchant for high concept and challenge..." because I would have been eliminated in that system, but as he concludes "...But it can probably be done either way..."
It is difficult to put the finger on what triggered the transformation of education in design, from an education in skills and knowledge into a simple rite of passage. There is evidence of some sort of Darwinism combined with a false sense of democratisation playing havoc in the educational system. In an effort to make education accessible, some have concluded that success in that chosen education is also a right and that some later elimination process would take care of the rest. It does not explain everything. To lower standards of success does not necessarely imply that the curriculum has to be stripped to a bare minimum. There has clearly be, as Martin implies, an interuption in a long continious tradition, that, in spite of finding appropriate forms of expression and style in and for each generation, guarded a set of skills and knowledge that was passed on from one to the other, It allowed the trained eye to enjoy any work of art, not only or in the first place for it's historical significance, but as an expression of a more universal art that linked all periods and all cultures. It could measure the art of a Sung tea bowl by the same standards as the Mona Lisa. From having the knowledge to be able to say: "This is a good Picasso, or Michelangelo, and this is a bad one" we have reduced ourselves to recognize the artist and to express at best a black and white judgement. " I like Roy Lichtenstein" or "I do not like Andy Warhol", not, "this is a good one and this is a weak one"
Was it the loss of self-control and self-regulation lost in complying with the university structures? Yes in some cases it was. The schools that formed the Bertoia's, Eames', Saarinnen's etc. like Cranbrook, would never have fit into any University sytem. Neither was the Hoheschule fur Gestaltung Ulm. Especially in the scandinavian countries and north america the structuring or re-structuring of design and architectural schools into the "classic" university model has often been a disaster. Especially by recruting teaching staff on the basis of academic credentials rather than professional ones. Could it be the only reason, no I do not think so. Neither design or architecture have been good at building a "body of knowledge" Most often, a superficial knowledge of the history of the profession, often reduced to the buildings or products that stand out in that history more so than the ideas behind it, a fast introduction to the use of the ever changing tools of the profession and a jargon that replaces a true vocabulary is what the student is left with. The rest is a collection of projects done according to the "flavor of the day" presentation technique...and there you go, you just got yourself a bachelor degree...
I have a hypothesis about what drives the phenomenon you describe...Part 1
and it is rooted in the dynamic of accelerating technological change. My hypothesis is this:
In production of goods, wisdom, skill, technology, materials, distribution, marketing, equity and debt are the fundamental resources applied to create and sell the good. As technological change accelerates and permeates more and more of the process, the technology component increases in weight of claim on the pie chart of resources applied and, rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly), is increasingly assumed to be the origin of the revenues and profits generated.
What this really means is: management and investors and even consumers increasingly begin to believe that technology, and not wisdom or skill in the given product design and development, is the largest driver of profitability. It claims the most resources, there fore it must be the most critical factor. It is stupid thinking, but I think it is the model that drives much management, investor and customer thinking today. The most technologically sophisticated product, not the best designed product, must be the most desirable product, because it is the most technologically sophisticated. Our society is caught in a logical circularity or product development--a technological tautology if you will. It is partly why the military buys armaments that don't work very well. It is why great firms like BMW introduce gluts of electronics that are poorly thought out and don't improve the car. It is why Sony produces fabulously reliable and effective consumer electronics with manifold capabilities that noone can figure out how to use. It is why soft ware from Microsoft is always overloaded with capabilities that are largely and rarely understood well enough to use even if desired.
I have a hypothesis about what drives the phenomenon you describe...Part 2
We are all of us caught up in a digital information revolution and its ramifications are many and shaking civilization to its foundations. Its major ramification is that it facilitates a wholesale, order of magnitude acceleration in technology creation and distribution. We had never really recovered from the hurricane like effects of the industrial revolution and its rudimentary InfoTech effects, which I believe largely set in motion the degradation of the educational process and the truncating of knowledge between professional traditions and contemporary education that Koen describes so aptly, before the digital information revolution hit like a second hurricane.
So now, in this day and age, the tendency is to create, build, distribute, finance, buy and sell technology masquerading as products, rather than designs masquerading as products.
In fact, many products are getting very much better in certain narrow respects. Cars are more reliable. So are TVs. So toasters I suppose. Reliability is something that is easily quantified and measured and turned into a technique.
But wisdom is not. In turn, the wisdom of products is receding almost yearly.
Why? Because no one is paying for wise products. The margins and the volumes are in the patenting of techniques, not the patenting of wise techniques.
Without accelerating technological development, we might expect to see the wisdom component catch back up to the technological component and get more in sync. And when it did we could expect to see more sensible product more sensibly designed, marketed, etc.
But technological development is accelerating by almost every index available to empirical checking. Patents are up. Scientific research, while being targeted in less and less rational ways, is accelerating. And more and more persons in more and more cultures are producing more and more technology.
I have a hypothesis about what drives the phenomenon you describe...Part 3
The current result is that management increasingly seek the person who can package and repackage technology into existing forms as more important that the person who can redesign a new integration of the new technology into a new and sensible organic form. This leads to Alain Berteaus of design in my opinion. Don't fundamentally design us a new chair that totally integrates all the change that has happened to date. No one has time for that and even if you do by the time we bring it out there will be so much more technological change it will already be obsolete. Just grab an old design consumers in a target marketing niche are comfortable with and give it a new twist that integrates some of the new materials or colors or textures we can do for nothing in a Chinese prison and let's get it to market in a hurry, before the novelty of even it wears off.
Everything but our wisdom has accelerated to the speed of pixels it seems.
I believe it was Einstein who hinted at this phenomenon soon after the A-bomb when he said everything had changed but the way we think.
We live in an age of abundant and growing short neural connections (digitally technologized thought) and a cache of long connections (wisdom) that tried to catch up for awhile and now seems to have given up the race, or at least to be falling ever farther behind.
Schools are epistemic communities. They cannot help but be deeply altered by the digital information revolution that they have been instrumental in proliferating. They are producing the kind of students that this kind of thinking leads to. Students trained in techniques of design, not in design; students of techniques of architecture, not students of architecture.
I have a hypothesis about what drives the phenomenon you describe...Part 4
It is the difference between an old computer programmer who worked in machine language, lower languages, cobalt, and then thought it would be a good idea to technologize some of the routines into object orient programming icons that could be programmed with wisely when it saved time vs. the young programmer who came along later and skipped learning the lower languages and got on with cobalt and programming objects. The younger programmer gave up elegance and dexterity and insight that went with the deeper knowledge of programming and in exchange got to spend more time producing marketable, if increasingly inelegant software for end users.
It is like the old financial analyst (me for example) who had to learn to do cashflow modelling by hand and so got a systematic AND a wise grasp of the implications of cashflow modelling manipulations vs. the younger financial analyst who skipped directly to running interations on a finished, black box cashflow model and leaped far ahead of the old analyst in knowing how to make the finished model do gymnastics of numbers, but never learned whether the model itself made any sense in all situations or only some.
Young designers are manipulating models now rather than designing. It is, I believe, the unfortunate gestalt of the time. Just as the military increasingly must make do with increasingly powerful, but increasingly less elegant and useful technology when applied in the real world, so to consumers are being force to make do with goods that seem less and less relevant and fitting to the reality in which they use them. Both the Harrier fighter plane and the Digital VCR/DVD and the Microsoft software have manifold capabilities and capture massive revenues in their sale. They design just often has very poor practical function in the world of people in a great many realms of everyday application.
Are there other factors driving the trend in schools producing designers who are design model manipulators rather than designers who try to work a design problem through organically? Yes, but I suspect the context I have laid out above is indirectly or directly shaping those triggers as well.
To some extend Martin
expressed the same concern with his "...Why are we in such a hurry?...". As a tried to argue in another thread, I think that the phenomena you so well describe Don, started much earlier. It was in the beginning of the 17th century that Hume, Descartes etc. started not only to question the efficiency of the classic science that combined both questions "why" and "how", and started a mouvement in which the "why" would take second stage and "how" would become the main motivation behind progress and the the standard by which progress should be measured...and so a cell phone that is also a camera and a small screen TV is "better" than a cellphone that only transmits the human voice. I realize I am repeating part of your contribution so...product wisdom...I think it should be a major concern to all of us to see how, instead of achieving freedom, we seem to reach for more and more dependencies. When looked at closely, most dependencies are an embarrassment. I am, for instance, not feeling much pride over the fact that I need a dictionary in order to write this (I even had to look up "embarrassment"). My dependence on that book is nothing to brag about and yet, if I feel such an urgent need to have a Barcelona chair that I spend the equivalent of a few weeks of work, to call it my own, I will proudly tell my friends....well I would not, I never wrote a contribution to the "best Bargain" thread and the only Arne Jacobsen chair a found in the garbage was subsequently changed and re-shaped to see if I could improuve it...Yes I am an anachronism in the design world, I try to design products that look as if they were never designed but the result of some kind of obvious almost natural consensus, so unassuming that they do not distract me from more important things in life, but so appropriate that you try to keep them as long as possible because they serve you well. In the design community there is very little support for that kind of attitude, which is understandable because it leads ultimately to the abolition of the profession. What is more hopeful is that a lot of "consumers" seem to agree and some of these products have been on the market for decades. Maybe we should re-introduce the "why" question into the design education and in asking "why" we might discouver that new direction that is so badly needed.
Why vs. How gets to the heart of it...Pt. 1
and tracing it to Descarte helps me put it into a historical legacy that drives the point home with resonance.
The duality precipitated by Descarte and other philosophers of his time and the ensuing divergence of thought and action that haunts epistemological underpinnings of most fields to this day, as a result, should quite logically apply to design, shouldn't it? It is quite logical to me now that you describe it. Design as a field came along relatively recently, but still it bears in its philosophical dna the same haunting of why vs. how?
Speaking from my own educational experience in a very middle class American school system of 1960s and early 1970s, I can say that the why of things was practically never touched upon, except in some existential sense of why do things have to be this way? What can be done and how can it be done dominated all curricula that I experienced. Even my philosophy courses in early undergraduate school really did not examine or contemplate the why of anything? Imagine that! They focused instead on comparison of philosophical systems and on logic and on what exactly was the nature of consciousness and whether the human mind was or was not capable of certain transformations (could it be transmogrified into computer intelligence, what would it mean to have machine based or augmented intelligence, etc.). It did not ask the most basic question of truthful inquiry: why? why are we here? why is this thing where it is? why is it configured in the way that it is? why should we or it exist? why are we doing this? This omission of this question, or at least the teaching of persons to ask this question, really annihilates the sovereignty of the individual. If I never ask why I am buying something, why I exist, or why things are as they are and not another way, then I am not so much a person as a receptacle for whatever others would wish to put in me, or inform me with, or make me consume.
Come to think of it this absense of asking why probably had an equally dehumanizing ancillary effect? Without asking why it hardly occurs to ask who? Who am I? And so the great question of art, who am I, is diluted and so the healing and transformative powers of the arts are diluted too. Why am I is pretext to who am I? Without "why does this product exist the way it does," it hardly occurs to ask who it exists for in any humane way?
Why vs. How gets to the heart of it...Pt. 2
Michel Foucault, were he still among us, would probably argue that Descarte's articulation (i.e, his bringing inner discourse into public discourse) that triggered the duality between why and how was likely coopted by the power network of society to create epistemic institutions that would increase the control of the nation of people by limiting its opportunity set of choices by instituting the answers to why (or by institutionally marginalizing the answer to irrelevance so as to increase the tightness of constraint on peoples choices and so make them more tightly controlled and directed by the powers that be. This is a quite remarkable prospect as I think about it.
What it suggests is that as the institutionalization of why, or perhaps more accurately the institutionalization of not asking why, has spread and permeated throughout the activities of society the last few centuries, more and more we find ourselves conditioned, or institutionally determined not to ask why? And if we don't ask why, then we tend less to ask who? Or perhaps more accurately, we tend decreasingly to connect the why and the who. The functional questions would be why are we making this and for who? Instead, we dysfunctionally ask what and how can we make this artifact for who can we make it? Do you see the profound difference, Koen? It shifts the making of artifacts from a service to a strategic challenge. If we ask why, then there is always the possible answer of not doing it, because it isn't needed. But if we ask only what or how to make things, then the reason we ask for who do we make them is to help us figure out how we can shape the artifact to make a group of persons buy them whether they need them or not. Put another way, we ask who mostly to figure out a target that can be manipulated into consuming it.
Why vs. How gets to the heart of it...Pt. 3
It follows then in such a society and economy that humans need to be further constrained, and then engineered, and then perhaps even genetically redesigned to make them accept what we are going to make for them no matter what, because we have discovered how to make a particular thing.
Frankly, this is all kind of scary, is it not? Not original--I've heard others get at it from other directions--but scary in a Star Trek Borg kind of way.
An intellectual capacity to quantify and formalize, a receptivity to educational indoctrination, a capacity for cost/benefit training, susceptibility to political propaganda, religious training that explains the why of everything in a single god, superficial aesthetic standards and media propagated tastes, etc., all seem to have produced a civilization that doesn't ask why in any functional sense, only in an existential sense. Why is life a living hell? Why is life so lacking in purpose? Why must it all be this way? These are all why questions people ask without expecting answers? These are emotions expressed as questions.
So, Koen, we do not merely need to return why to the curriculum, but we need to return a particular kind of why to the curriculum. We need to characterize the why to be asked as the kind of why with an answer. We need to distinguish it from the helpless, unanswerable emotional why?
And all of this because a few mathmaticians found it easier to formalize what and how than why?
This is a great example of the chaos theory concept that a butterfly can flap its wings in one part of the world and precipitate a vast storm system somewhere else, because chaotic, complex systems are sensitively dependent on intitial conditions.
Descarte, it would appear, was such a philosophical butterfly.
Before I try to
add to the topic, just two things: First of all we should not give Descartes too much credit although he made the important step of showing that the "how" could be translated in mathematical...and thus "objective" formulas. I would start with Humes and Hobbes' critic of the classic sciences...but I should do better and recommend the reading of Jonathan I. Israel's "Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the making of modernity (Oxford University Press,2001)...as to the link between "why" and "who" the thought crossed my mind that Hamlet's Shakespeare (a close contempory of all three) starts with the short frase: "Who's there?"
young minds,profit times
I believe this in there own ways have been covered by other writters in this conversation but hear i start as i wish to keep it short&sweet & aid the topic, products theses days are managed by market-orientated managers who produce to sell, & not product-orientated managers who think you/us/cunsumers will buy because they will produce like once it was.It is about ROI (return on interest). Being innovative does not have relevents unless you can back it up. Once on the market, copycats copy and upgrade & take the market share (Sony lost £100million when not upgrading from then the becoming outdated VCR)What is happening is designs are half baked, just so that the next 'greater' idea can be introducted to the market(with such 'improvements')...It is not about devine design but devine profit. I know of a very good visionaire but he needs to make a living and therefore needs to produce design that can be backed up. The question of 'why' is only exceptable if it answers how much capital, in somes ways that is exceptable...but at what cost??Design itself?surely not. With 90% of design only out there to take part of the market share, then surely design isn't no more just design for design sake but design for capital sake! This has effected the education systems mind set in my view. I Like Naoto Fukasawa because his design is countering the philosophy of current-design to sell. He is asking 'why design?' which is genius when considering that 90% are hungry for the market share then designing.
Some thoughts
My quick answer to the initial question is: There are fewer design icons today because designers dont care about quality and because consumers dont either.
Altho I am too young to know when it began, I can see the current model of consumerism always inexorably moving away from quality and towards quantity. The entire structure of production is now based on the bottom line, instead of such seemingly expendable notions as reputation, craftsmanship, durability, and quality.
When we look back at someone like Charles Eames we see a man who aptly stated that design was not the idiosynchrosies of a single person, but the universal qualities in all people (pardon my paraphrasing). The Eames Office produced furniture that WORKED. That it happened to have pleasing lines was almost an afterthought, a realization that if you design something for function form will follow. Ray is quoted as describing the lounge chair as "un-design-y..but nice"
In the time of Charles Eames quality was the focus -with the belief being that consumption would follow. Now consumption is the primary goal. Companies are willing to release poorly designed products because they know said product will be outdated in a few months - replaced with something newer, better, and more expensive.
On the other hand, we as consumers are also guilty. We have come to expect low quality. It is again a shift - toward convenience, availability and price. We, like the producers, know that even tho this particular product may not work perfectly - an upgrade will soon be available.
As such I think there is a lack of drive to create something that is truly "well designed"
Deep Design vs. Shallow Design Pt.1
First, the above comments are all illuminating to me. Thanks.
Second, I'd like to add that it is important to discount, or allow for a tendency to oversimplify about, the good old days of the past.
There were frankly a relative handful of great masters of modernism, as there seem to be a handful of great masters in any age of design or the arts.
Further, there were a great many modestly talented persons working during the era in which these great masters of modernism worked.
So: the past was no Eden.
But even when we discount for the fact that Eames, Mies, Corbu, Jacobsen, Bertoia and those I am leaving out were a minority in their time, we ARE left with an apparently fundamental difference between the thoroughness of the designing they did and the thoroughness of the designing being done now.
Thoroughness, as I'm using it, refers to the extent to which a person designs, or perhaps redesigns, a product from start to finish; i.e., are they taking the product back to first principles and completely reworking it in light of contemporary human needs, materials, cost/benefit constraints, and marketing tools.
Since thorough design is kind of a mouthful, I'm going to use "deep design" as a slightly easier to say and more memorable phrase for the notion of thorough design.
I am reminded here particularly of Koen's brilliant retrospective analysis of his Tilt-a-Bowl. It was a rigorously and well thought out redesign of a basic kitchen artifact, the mixing bowl, that improved the function AND the beauty at the price and cost points of the time in contemporary materials that provided a high degree of durability and ease of use. It was as nearly, as he could tell, largely done in by a change in the retail channel. He designed it thinking it would be sold in retail stores that had a knowledgeable sales staff on the floor to help educate and persuade the customer. But between conception and actually putting the bowls on the store shelves, stores changed over to large dept. store and discount retailers where the product had to sell itself.
Deep Design vs. Shallow Design Pt.2
Either of two lessons can be drawn from Koen's story, it seems to me.
One, the design, production, distribution, retailing system is so complex and fraught with change that deep designing simply cannot reliably yield products that succeed largely and frequently enough to off-set the development costs associated with deep design.
Or, two, the complexity of the process mentioned above is such that we ought to do deep designing that also anticipates that complexity.
It seems that designers, producers, distributors, retailers and increasingly the schools that produce all of them have learned lesson one. They have opted for superficial recycling and reworking of existing concepts--what I will call shallow design. (Note: I am not seeking to berate this sort of design by calling it shallow design. I am just trying to give it a name for the sake discussion.)
Apparently shallow design solves some of the alleged problems of deep design by reducing design cost, design time, the tendency to produce products that require p2p education to grasp, and the risk that deeply designed products will not shout loudly enough on the shelf to be grabbed in impulse buying environments. In short, shallow designed products seem to be very successful in maximizing the customers buying experience.
Unfortunately, shallow designed products seem significantly less effective at maximizing the customer's user experience. Shallow design is apparently leading to products of inferior function and beauty that fail to innovate, fail to be durable and fail to respect currently looming environmental constraints.
It is understandable that many designers, who might prefer deep design, have thrown up their hands at the system and settled into shallow design. Everyone's gotta eat, as they say.
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