In response to the Westfield Group of companies putting up Christmas decorations in thier Malls two months early I would like to remind readers that November 28th is Buy Nothing Day. Here is part of the campaign from Adbusters...

This is a great Ted Talks presentation from Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. He discusses the role of design in solving bigger problems, asking the right questions and using human centred, divergent thinking in more collaborative ways.

Watch out for Frank Gehry's Fish...

This has been on my mind for some time and as a result I have put a [virtual] stake in the ground by changing the header image on my blog to one of my personal craft/design outputs.
I am currently reading a few books regarding the development of design over the past two centuries.  The Craftsman by Richard Sennet and A Theory of Craft by Howard Risatti both seek to unpack the origins of craft artefacts, the status of craft in society, the positioning of craft against fine art and mapping the transition into contemporary design.
Sennet talks about the concept of mastery and how a maker/practitioner would move from apprentice to journeyman and finally to Master (a timeframe of a minimum 10 years). The tacit knowledge of the aging master in turn being passed on to sons or apprentices generation upon generation. It is this concept of Mastery that I have been reflecting upon; in particular my own skill set as a maker, designer and teacher and how rarely I get to explore and share my passion for the beauty of materials and my skills in making.
In Telling Tales - Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design, Gareth Williams also maps the nature of the Art-Craft-Design relationship.

"Where artists, craftspeople and designers were once part of the same creative tradition, a schism occurred.........By the 20th Century the tradition had splintered so that art=individualism, craft=making and design=managing production. It is a truism that the boundaries between these disciplines have since blurred again....."

This blurring is clearly evident among the types of projects that emerge from our final year students - from the singular beautiful artefact to the world changing product-service system with no tangible artefact. Is this OK?
Yes. Let it be.
There are no rules here and the nature of our degree programme and the breadth and depth of staff skills and knowledge (Mastery) within the Design and Visual Arts Department certainly offers the opportunity for both students (and staff) to signify their own location at any point on this continuum while still achieving success in study, making, research, exhibition, publishing and production.
So what of the connection between craft and sustainability? Many of the references to product design and the unsustainable nature of 'stuff' can be traced back to the relationship with consumerism, current economic paradigms and the excess of production. By returning to core production values, understanding the nature of materials, their origins and the production methods and technologies required to reveal the artefact within. Such an understanding creates explicit value link through the skill, mastery and tacit knowledge of the craftsman, embedded in the object. The true value of so many disposable commodities is lost in translation via the commercial transaction, excess choice and oversupply undermining the true embedded production value set. One visit to an injection moulding company opens the eyes to the craftwork of the designer, toolmaker and production technicians.
So the value lies in understanding.
Whatever the scale of production, singular or multiple, intended or unintended; know your materials, know why you are choosing them, how you intend to manipulate them, and that the beauty of the artefact is not lost along the way. The Dutch journalist Henk Hofland described the product aging process in one of his columns. He said that objects first become cherishable, after which they get nostalgic value. Finally they end up being antiques. The problem we face today is that many products don’t even make it to the first cherishable stage. (Eternally Yours. van Hinte, 2001) Through understanding, we may begin to imbue everyday products with craft values and perhaps move away from the commodification of design and designed objects towards markets of demand and supply and create the valued antiques of tomorrow.

This approach to furniture embodies a number of principles I value. Simple, elegant, nested, cold construction, capable of transforming with fashion....new antiques maybe?

Israeli students Coffee design interventions. Nice bit of play in glass, ceramic and SLA. 

This article reiterates the conversations that have been taking place in our faculty and among my colleagues and students over the past 12 - 18 months. The face of product and industrial design is changing rapidly and the next generation of students will need to be capable of adaptation in this rapidly changing paradigm. Our design discipline (as we currently know it) will be gone within a decade. Design education needs to keep pace and I believe we are having all the right conversations at Unitec. Next....action.

Six challenges for design education

Thursday 25 June 2009

Design education is failing to equip students with the necessary skills to work in public services if it remains solely focused on product and industrial design, according to a new paper published today by the RSA.

The paper – Social Animals: tomorrow’s designers in today's world – says that design education is not keeping pace with the growing demand for new design professionals able to operate in a range of service-based environments.   

The paper argues that design education is still largely predicated on industrial principles. Students need to be equipped with a broader range of research and communication skills, alongside their more traditional design skills, and encouraged to think more laterally about the sites and spaces where these could be used.

The report outlines six challenges for design educators:

1. Design courses should do more to encourage students to immerse themselves in the moments of interaction between a person and a service and translate this research into actionable insights.
2. When working with people on co-design projects, students need to recognise that participation will have an impact on those people’s lives. There needs to be an ethical code of practise to prevent designers treating participants insensitively or instrumentally.
3. Prototyping the design of new services requires significant further development as part of any future design curriculum. Students must learn how to move from research, to actionable insights, to a process of prototyping potential solutions.
4. Students need to be taught how to appreciate the ‘bigger picture’ – taking into account multiple stakeholders, and wider social, political and cultural forces that shape what is possible. A public service context demands that students find new ways of making these forces integral to their solution.
5. Design education must build students’ skills in articulating, both visually and verbally, their service propositions, enabling them to communicate their ideas in terms of benefits to users, providers or society more widely. Currently, students are not familiar with the language or visual methods of practising public service designers and do not know how to turn their ideas into propositions in which people might invest.
6. Students must learn how to become ‘problem finders’ as well as problem solvers – helping organisations define the nature of the problem as well as how to respond to it. As budgetary pressures grow so to will the pressure to find fundamentally new ways of delivering public services. Designers must know how to work ‘upstream’ and be confident of the distinctive value they can bring to strategic design in public services.

The paper concludes that young designers are increasingly questioning the idea that design is primarily about material culture, or the business of making things. They realise that they risk missing out on a massive expanding market if they do not apply their skills to services as well as goods and products: in a globalised economy, services touch every part of our lives with over 20 million of us working in the service industries.

Author of the report, Sophia Parker, said:

“Service design is concerned with finding new ways of empowering people to take action themselves – designing people in to solutions, rather than ignoring their significance and designing them out; it is about seeing the social fabric of local communities as the site and source of solutions rather than the destination to which public services are delivered.”

RSA Head of Design, Emily Campbell said:

“As the market for design has expanded into service innovation, and as young designers have become increasingly anxious to embody social or ethical value, some design schools have incorporated the study of social science into design education and placed a greater emphasis on user research. Our student design awards scheme, with its heavy social emphasis, has been great for these schools. But Sophia’s paper has revealed how many are still unsure how to provide a complete education to emerging professionals.”

The paper concludes that:

• design education should review grading and marking systems in order to create a mechanism that assesses some of the key components in service design – like user and stakeholder engagement, journey mapping and the complex dynamics between different users of a service
• more should be done to build relationships with local councils, government agencies, and charities to broaden opportunities and contexts in which design students can test themselves.
  

Seriously, this had to happen some time (ROFL)