schön's predicament

Let Them Make the Thing First

When introducing design methods, perhaps it would be a good idea to focus instruction purely on the product at first. What table, matrix, or whatever should they make? What criteria should that thing adhere to? Explanation as to why those rules apply, and what role the method can and/or cannot play in a design process seem to fall mostly on deaf ears at first contact.

Make the thing. Do it again in a different course. Reflect on the process of making and using it. Learn the theoretical considerations then instead of beforehand. Concrete application before abstract explanation. The other way ’round feels logical to teachers, but may simply not be very effective. You haven’t created a ‘time to tell’ yet (c.f. Daniel Schwartz)

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.

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.

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.