design education

Three Limits

As a part of becoming competent designers, students need to become aware of, accept, and learn to deal with, three cognitive limits. Students often believe (1) that they can imagine forms and geometries accurately in their mind’s eye, (2) that they can keep complex structures in thought, and (3) that they can predict their behaviour and other properties. But people in general are quite bad at all three of these things. Sketching and making models are necessary to overcome these limitations and to prevent unpleasant surprises when conflicts, omissions, and unexpected effects are discovered too late in the process.

Study / Practice / Read

I studied design at university. Or did I? You don’t really “study” design. You practice it. So perhaps I should say that I trained as a designer. Or even that I was trained in design.

Is this analogous to how the British say that they “read” philosophy or history at university? Reading history, learning its contents, is different from training to become a historian, able to add something to the field.

Come to think of it, is this what is happening in the master “Design Curating & Writing” at the design academy in Eindhoven, and at the MFA “Products of design” in New York? These students seem more to “read” design than to practice design ability.

Balancing Plan and Opportunity

Design is something you learn through experience. And all design projects, even though they may have started from the same assignment, are unique. This means that every student experiences a certain course differently from their colleagues, and that each of them learns different things as a result.

On the one hand, you want to minimize these differences. After all, courses have learning goals, and you want all your students to achieve those same goals. On the other hand, sometimes something happens in a student’s project that gives them—and only them—a valuable opportunity to learn something. As a design teacher or tutor, you should jump on this. You never know when or if another opportunity will arise for that student to learn that particular lesson.

But focusing on one thing means diverting attention from another thing. So by responding to this unexpected opportunity for some unplanned but valuable lesson, you decrease the likelihood of that student learning the thing that you hoped they would learn beforehand. Or at least you might detract from the depth of their learning experience on that point.

Explanation and Instruction

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.