Designing isn’t something you can learn by having it explained to you. It’s something you must learn from experience. You can only learn how to do it by doing it. This creates a paradoxical situation. Design students find themselves in a predicament. They must start doing without knowing how to. They must accept that there is something they need to learn without knowing what skills and habits, exactly, their desired expertise entails, or how they’ll know whether they’ve learned it.
Teachers of design find themselves on the other side of this same frustrating, paradoxical situation. You cannot teach design, or any other complex skill, for that matter, by teaching it. Not if teaching means explaining or transferring knowledge. You can’t even explain why, exactly, the exercises you assign are important because learning how they are useful can only happen by looking back at having done them.
This paradox and predicament is described by Donald Schön (in The Design Studio and in Educating the Reflective Pracitioner). His analysis helps to explain one of the trickier situations in design education.
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