In my experience it is not often that “industry” people and “academic” people sit in a room together and have lengthy talk about design education i.e. what we value, what we think should change and what frustrates us. So the first thing to say is thanks to AltShift / Derek Yates et al and Ustwo for getting us in one place and hosting yesterday’s discussion. In attendance were various people working in the digital media industry, aswell as teachers and educational staff from a range of HE and FE institutions. Over the course of an afternoon we had a few reoccurring themes that were articulated in different ways so I’ll start with those…
One of the key issues the panel identified was the changing face of what a designer/creative practitioner is, or should be. In the past this inspirational figure (often male) was the lone creative genius. Now of course digital creative practice is collaborative, open, networked and social — so the archetype needs to change. But I felt (and certainly this was echoed by other academics) that many aspects of the academy infrastructure are still geared towards producing these lone creative genius types… The challenges I took from this are — How we as teachers find ways to encourage cross disciplinary collaboration? How we change assessment procedure so its less focused on outcome and more on process? How we introduce more group work? I recently took part in a module assessed entirely orally, through verbal contribution — maybe this is way to shift away from outcomes? We really questioned whether a portfolio is still a relevant endpoint for an arts student? Taken to a rather nice extreme the panel started ruminating on the value of failure… We agreed that to be ambitious, try an idea in new area and fail spectacularly constituted a really valuable learning experience, but our assessment systems don’t recognise this sort of endeavour. We decided on the “Failed Gloriously Award”… D&AD are you listening? Lawrence Zeegan pointed to Green Week — a UAL project that stepped outside of the module system and assessment and possibly encouraged a less outcome driven educational process. Also, a couple of references to interesting digital media / education projects also popped up: Sugata Mitra — Hole in The Wall and Granny Cloud well worth checking out.
But if we don’t want so many of these lone male ego maniac creative types, what types of designers do we want? The panel came up with lots of adjectives to describe their perfect graduates and I thought these might be quite helpful for students to hear: Collaborative, resourceful, inquisitiveness, empathetic… In a reference to IDEO’s Tim Brown’s description of the ideal designer some of the panel advocated ‘T’ shaped people. In terms of skills, Joe Macleod from Ustwo was looking for students that understood design principles and core design competencies over and above highly specialised software skills. i.e good research, problem definition, thinking iteratively and the ability to synthesis information. Chris Downs from Method came up with some relevant insights in this area. As he runs service design company he often has the challenge of recruiting grads. for a discipline that doesn’t exist yet in the academy. He explained service design is utterly reliant on multi-disciplinary teams so the things he looks for in candidates are a willingness to collaborate, a point of view, passion and ideas about how they see and want to change the world, rather than a cemented previous professional title or position. He went on to suggest that in the past a designer’s job was all about control, specifying how things should look and making sure they looked the same everywhere — but now its about relinquishing control and assuming responsibility…(be good to unpack that a bit in a later post) It was quite sad to hear that the courses he wants to teach on are all outside of the UK and he cited CIID ,NYU, Ireya and Fabrica as examples of institutions he felt were running interesting courses.
How we prepare graduates for this changing/changed employment environment was touched upon. Certainly a commitment to life long learning seemed to be something important with staff, students and industry all needing input to keep up with change. How educational courses adapt to change was also mentioned. The pace of change within the academy it was universally agreed was very slow…”they are big beasts” was muttered… What we even call these new courses was also identified as tricky… a problem reflected in the industry with words like interaction, social and media so widely assigned that meaning has become tricky to pin down. Some of the academics in the panel rather mutinously decided we should keep our old course titles and just change the content, that way we don’t scare the horses.
Derek Yates our MC was rightly keen to move our discussion towards some actionable points and solutions to these seemingly intractable issues. In this regard, Fred Deakin had a great idea to start a series of small live projects that combine industry and student teams. He expressed bafflement that our student’s final pieces are often hidden away — why isn’t their work in the public domain? This desire to see art school project outcomes in public would inform these potential projects described as “small ongoing forays into the public arena”… As I understood it, these would be socially responsible projects that tackling real world problems. He added that if we really wanted to change the way education works then small successful projects that engage the public might be a great forerunner for change and a way to circumvent the bureaucrats. A couple of other ideas I Iiked: Move away from the narrowness of course structures by making design education much more project focussed (project centred education) — encouraging interdisciplinary approaches. Educate parents about what a design education is and what a career in the industry might look like… Seems like any move towards demystifying what we do is a good one to me.
Overall I think what the discussions clearly pinpointed was there was quite a bit of frustration on both sides, in the sense that industry feel its hard to find the graduates they want and the academics feel the structures of their institutions make it hard to meet change. But to return to my opening comments, what I would say was very positive about this event, was that it gave us a bit of space to air these issues… And in doing so I could see that, although there are gaps between industry and education (and some gaps are important to maintain), we also share a lot of the same concerns and motivations for change. Maybe more platforms for this sort of dialogue is one way for us to improve how we educate students, not just on the topic of digital media but in other areas as well? Returning to our subject, it did seem that for us in education, we need to find ways to take on board and engender in our students the shift in attitudes, mindsets and behaviors that a digital context has brought about. That said we should avoid knee jerk responses to change, that lead to rooms full of kit that nobody uses, or creative applications of digital media being taught in a superficial or purely skills based way. Instead we need to enable students to grasp the contexts, theories and political implications of this technology so they are empowered by it and use it not just to fit into the industry but to evolve and challenge it.