Bob van Vliet

Grades

It is taken for granted that students taking a course will receive grades. But when we give a course or workshop to colleagues, or when we follow professional training as part of our jobs, nobody even thinks of handing out grades. We’d actively protest, I believe. This would be silly. We’re adults, thank you very much!

We don’t mind being assessed. In fact, many participants in courses, workshops, and training programs welcome feedback, positive and negative (constructive). And we expect to be tested. But we expect the result to simply be pass/fail. Why on Earth should we get grades on a scale of 1-10?

But then, what’s so different with students?!

Ontwerptheorie, ontwerpkritiek

Het is al vaak opgemerkt, maar het blijft een ding dat er zo weinig van ontwerptheorie door ontwerpers in de praktijk als relevant ervaren wordt. Een manier om dit voor nieuw werk te voorkomen, kan zijn om iets aan te pakken dat daadwerkelijk als een probleem of open vraag beleefd wordt.

Ik denk dat de vraag wat het betekent om universitair, academisch bezig te zijn als ontwerper hier een aardige kandidaat voor blijft. Hoewel het er wel op lijkt dat best veel mensen hier vrij concrete –eigen– ideeën over hebben. Dus misschien wordt het wel als relevante vraag ervaren, maar niet zozeer als probleem. In ieder geval niet door degenen met hun eigen pet theory.

Iets dat in ieder geval voor studenten een relevante vraag lijkt –een zeer zeker als probleem ervaren wordt!– is hoe ontwerpvoorstellen beoordeeld worden. Wat voor soort kritiek kun je verwachten? En hoe verdedig je je voorstel?

Vandaag bij de presentaties waar studenten met ontwerpvoorstellen kwamen, kwamen er een paar mooie langs.

“Ik denk niet dat het mechanisme gaat werken zoals jullie denken dat het werkt,” gebaseerd op natuurkundige en mechanische kennis en redenatie.

“OK, ik geloof dat het zou doen wat jullie denken, maar treedt er daarnaast niet ook dit effect op, dat ongewenst is?,” op basis van simulerend denken.

“Wat is nu eigenlijk het waardevoorstel? Ja, het doet wat jullie denken, maar oplossing X zou toch met minder kosten een veel beter resultaat opleveren?!”, op basis van kennis van alternatieven en kritisch denken over de probleem- en doelstelling.

“Oe, gaaf, maar waarom hebben jullie onderdeel Y niet op manier Z gemaakt, dan wordt het effectiever/goedkoper/sterker/…,” op basis van creatief mee-ontwerpen en kennis van alternatieve deeloplossingen.

Dit zijn:

kritiek dat het gedrag incorrect voorspeld is
kritiek dat het gedrag onvolledig voorspeld is
kritiek op de waarde van het ontwerp
kritiek dat het ontwerp niet optimaal is

Wat ook leidt tot kritiek…

… dat het ontwerp onvolledig is
… dat het ontwerp incorrect (onmogelijk is)

Er kan kritiek zijn op minstens 3 niveau’s:

op de probleemstelling (niet duidelijk/volledig/concreet/specifiek)
op het concept (niet de beste aanpak, inherente nadelen/conflicten)
op de uitvoering (niet volledig, optimaal, goed voorspeld)

Of anders gezegd, op 3 aspecten:

functie
concept
optimalisatie

Do Less, Get More

We ask too much of our students. I believe that by asking less, we would get more. In the large introductory course that I teach in, at least, students are asked to do so many different new things in such a short amount of time that they don’t get a fair chance to really master much of it.

And everybody knows something isn’t right, judging by the amount of complaints from colleagues about all the things students don’t know, understand, or can’t do later on in their Bachelor’s. And whatever it is that’s wrong, it must be our fault, I believe. Because even if students were lazy –which they’re very much not– it’s us who passed them in all those courses.

The metaphor of “setting a high bar” sounds good, but isn’t right. Most courses consist of many different bars to jump over and hoops to jump through. And we give points for reaching almost high enough, but not quite. This means that by cramming our courses full with as much as we can get away with is guaranteed to lead to students passing while having mastered precious little of all that material.

So why do we do it? I see at least three reasons.

Who’s Wasting Whose Time?

Some teachers seem to feel that students who don’t pay attention in class, or that don’t show up, are wasting our time.

But it’s we who are spending their time. And if they don’t show up, or do something else, they apparently feel they can get more value out of that time than they see us to be offering.

Now, they might be wrong about this, but odds are that at least they’re acting rationally in according with their current judgement. If they don’t see that they’re wrong, you can’t blame them for acting against their own interests.

Production Is Required for Learning Design

Teaching design seems to require a focus on products. Not end-products, but the products of the process of design.

Students that are just starting out as designers do not –cannot– see what experts see. They do not see the complexity and lurking problems and hidden opportunities in their ideas. This must be brought in the open somehow, so that the student can be confronted with these unexpected features of their ideas.

A Note on In-Lecture Discussions

I gave a lecture on different ways of modelling where I asked the students to discuss with neighbors which role each of 6 ways of modelling might play in the design process, what they show, and what they hide. The goal was to explain that each does in fact highlight and leave out different aspects, so you should use as many of them as possible, and keep using different modelling methods throughout the project.

But they were at a point in their design projects where it was hard for them to understand the relevance of this, I think, so weren’t curious to know.

But also, for these in-lecture discussions to work, perhaps there needs to be a right answer. It helps when they can try to get it right, and then find out whether they did.

So not “discuss what a good problem statement looks like”, but “each of these three problem statements is good in one way, and bad in another way’. Find what is good and bad about each statement”.

Two Views of the Teacher-Student Relationship

One follows from the view that teachers know something students do not and that students do not know what’s good for them. Both true. But people seem to draw as a conclusion from this that teachers need to tell students what to do and that students should simpy listen. This does not work.

Another view sees students as rational adults, who can and should decide for themselves what they want and how to achieve this. This also seems to me a solid assumption. But proponents of this view draw from it the conclusion that we should let students take the lead, that they should decide how to approach their projects and what learning activities to engage in. This does not work, I believe, because it conflicts with the above truth that students –in the subject of what’s being taught– do not know what’s good for them. Teachers do. Or should, in any case.

But students need some understanding of how what they’re being asked to do is useful or necessary.

Teachers must understand how naïve and mistaken models can be dislodged and developed into the ones the teacher wants to teach. This is diffucult. But one way this most surely cannot be done is to simply tell the student and expect them to take your word for it.

On Design as Research

Designing a building or product forces you to solve a range of problems, to answer a set of questions. A car needs an engine cover, doors, a trunk that opens, openings in the body for headlights, etcetera. A building needs a stable structure, doors, windows, insolation, waterproofing, perhaps floor levels, it should provide functional spaces, etcetera. There are issues to deal with at the level of the whole design, and there are parts, fragments, and details to work out.

Dealing with such a set of issues, and their interactions, conflicts, and overlap, leads to a thorough interrogation of the material or technology you’re working with. Some of the answers will be specific to this one design. But a few of them will be of more general value. They could become a standard component, technique, or pattern. A standardized detail, combination of techniques, or construction method, for instance.

Such experiments can test and/or explore. They can ask, does it work? Or they can ask, what if?

Sketching Is Not Communicating

Sketching is not communicating.

Or at least, not where “communicating” means “transfer”.

I cannot look inside your head. The only thing I can see is the sketch. It is a public construction. One that I and you may have different mental models of. But the sketch, the model, is all there is.

You might say that you weren’t able to accurately express what you had in mind. But that tells me nothing, except that you judge the sketch to be a bad or incomplete proposal. Fine. Make another proposal. Change it. Develop it. Iterate. Or make it explicit (and public!) what it is that you find unsatisfactory in the model, or how your ideal might differ from it. Because again: I cannot magically look inside your head.

What Designers Know Depends on What They Want to Do

Designers’ knowledge is organized around typological models. But each discipline has their own way of modelling their subject. In fact, each discipline has a set of modelling languages in which they work.

Not only the kind of modelling is different, the breadth or level of abstraction is, too. Designers’ model knowledge serves not just to understand the world, but it is a tool for creating new artefacts and systems. So the way a designer models the world (relevant precedent) depends on their goal and professional context.