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Myself and a few other designers here at frog had the pleasure of sitting down with some folks from Art Center College of Design (ACCD), including Karen Hofmann, the new Chair of Product Design and Lorne Buchman, newly appointed president of ACCD. I love that they are engaging the professional design community to investigate what changes are happening at the forefront of our industry. Those of you that read the discussion boards know I feel design is not an academic activity, but it does require an academic foundation. This relationship leads to a natural disconnect between what is happening in the professional and academic worlds. A bit of this is a good thing as the academic environment needs to provide a safe place to learn and experiment, however too much distance can lead to irrelevance.
During the conversation it struck me how much we are requiring of new graduates. They need to be able to think broadly, but focus in on executing the details. They need to be comfortable mapping out a user scenario, wire-framing an experience, and pumping some CAD, all while not loosing any rapid visualization skills and maintaing the ability to throw down a hot sketch. We are expecting each one of them to be an entire design team!
If you look at the way many professional corporate and consulting design groups were set up in the past they were segregated by discipline. The product designers sit over here, usually with the engineers, and possibly the product marketing or business strategy folks. The brand, graphic and motion designers sit in another area, or an entirely different location, with brand marketing people. Researchers might be in a third isolated location. When groups are so divided, it can send a message to education that they need to train one person design armies.
Since starting at frog, I've learned a different way of working. The studios are completely co-mingled. As needed, a project team might have interaction designers, researchers, business strategists, mechanical engineers, software designers, graphic designers, technologists, modelers, and product designers all working for a single creative director and braided around a single problem. Each person can go deep on their individual speciality, but they have a natural appreciation for what each of the other disciplines are bringing to the metaphorical table because they sit at the same physical table. It is not easy to co-mingle 500+ creatives with very different backgrounds, but the results are better for it. It requires highly mixed project teams while maintaining discipline based mentorship to ensure people continue to grow in all dimensions. In this way the modern design team is much more like a cable. Each individual strand can only hold so much, but braid them together and you have something much stronger.
When I was a student (eons ago) we often had collaborative projects, but typically all of the students were in ID and we all wanted to do the same part of the project. If the students came from different departments, the projects could go much deeper while each student could retain their individual contribution, the ability to say "this is specifically what I did" in the interview.
To my knowledge, no design school is teaching in such a convergent way, instilling multidisciplinary working habits to build broader learning experiences and more robust student projects while building monodisciplinary skill sets to ensure viability in the workplace. I'm looking forward to see how ACCD evolves their program with their new leadership. Lorne, Karen and their team are smart people who care about the future of design. I'd also like to see other schools reevaluate the way they teach design to close the gap in a meaningful way and create those cable like working teams.
Comments
The recent merge of Finland's top Design, Business and Technology into Aalto University (http://www.aalto.fi/en/) was made with the purpose of bringing these multidisciplinary working habits for students of these three areas.
Additionally, Aaltos initatives like the IDBM program (International Design Business Managment) and the Design Factory bring together students, academicians and companies into multidisciplinary real-life projects which as well closes the gap between the academy and practice.
The d.school at Stanford isn't a design program in the traditional sense but the whole concept of the institute is to bring people from the other programs to form teams and solve problems. Sounds like design programs should consider implementing similar projects?
At Carnegie Mellon, the late Randy Pausch ran a great class called Building Virtual Worlds. It brought students together from the art, architecture, design, computer science programs. Surprised the design programs at CMU didn't think of this first...
SCAD (savannah college of art and design) has been doing this for a while already with a multidisciplinary design team from different departments trying to solve complicated design/business problems for a multitude of clients.
philadelphia university has been doing such collaborative projects for several years now. the administrators are currently instilling a new school within the university which consists of design majors, engineering and marketing majoring which they call the D.E.C. program (Design. Engineering. and Commerce) I am an industrial design student and my entire junior year was spent working in this collaborative setting, working and collaborating with marketing and engineering students on real life projects, all sponsored by companies within the product development industries with real life constraints
really really......nice article
Great article Michael! You might be interested in looking into the Institute of Design as a case study. It's a graduate only program based in Chicago with a student body of former engineers, marketers, programmers, architects, filmmakers etc, turned design researchers and strategists. Just some of the smartest people I've ever met!
Maybe instead of a post about a meeting talking about the future of a particular design school's philosophy possibly becoming more cross multi-disciplinary; a case study from one of the many schools already being very successful at this would be more stimulating...
Art Center's Graduate Media Design Program has also been doing this for years either from sponsored programs or partnered studios with initiatives like ACCD's DESIGNMATTERS. Many of these studios involved interdisciplinary teams of students from different majors and backgrounds.
This program also provides students with a designer's bag of tools/kit of parts if you will.
http://www.artcenter.edu/mdp/
Sigh.... Nobody takes the time to look at ASU. Look up InnovationSpace. Arizona State is the under appreciated love child of new design education, too bad nobody looks us up.
As a second year ID student, who just yesterday completed a collaborative project filled entirely by ID students I can't tell you how much your article resonated with me. It was a painful semester.
We are told that in practice there are several roles designers can play, however the course structure does not accomodate different directions in design. Unlike my collegues, I have less interest in CAD, and more in human factors and user experiences, but the only option I have to enhance this area of interest is a marketing minor.
Our lecturers defend the structure by saying they are trying to give us a "little bit of everything", when really - I want a lot of one thing, while a fellow student may want a lot of another.
While it is beneficial for ID students to work together with engineers, architects etc, as the course progresses, I would have liked the school to offer different directions within the industrial design major itself... but it doesn't. bugger.
Mike-
The University of Illinois at Chicago has this exact model as part of its curriculum for almost a decade. The class is 2 semesters long and comprised of 4th year ID, 4th year ME, and MBA students. The class is divided into multi disciplinary teams and each team is given a real world problem statement provided by a corporate sponsor. The teams work with the sponsor as a client throughout all phases of the product development process. At the end of the class the team delivers a fully engineered product ready for production or fully developed concepts that the client can then commercialize if they chose too. Here is a list of a few companies the program has worked with:
+ Whirlpool
+ Motorola
+ Dell
+ Pactiv
+ Cobra Electronics
The U of I example above is close to what I'm talking about but far from exact. I'm glad this provoked some discussion. I'll clarify my general statements by saying that what I'm talking about is like the U of I example above, but add in more disciplines and take out the industry sponsorship. A studio might be "redesigning Motorola" and ID/ME/UX students are working on the brand itself, cultural anthropologists are adding context throughout, MBAs are working on business plans with detailed retail roll outs and business partnerships, GD/UX students are working on the brand itself, digital experience, building brand values in collaboration with ID and MBA students.... THEN couple that with intensive MONO-discipliary courses that flank a main studio like that. Tradition deep, robust, and rigorous professional skill building (sketching, model making, and so on)... in this way, individuals retain their contribution, but it becomes more rich by what is happening all around them...if that exists, I have not seen it. Typically the multi D schools are week on the real skill sets, and the skill set focussed schools tend to be a bit narrow in their approach.
I'd also like to say that what I'm suggesting is not easy. Not easy at all. It is not something that can be layered on, but a fundamental top down shift that would have to come from the president or dean with cooperation of department heads. It isn't a single class, or a method, it is a philosophy.
I think the examples in the above comments are fantastic indicators. Now a larger shift at the top of the educational food chain needs to happen for it to fully materialize.
'Multidisciplinary Design Innovation' Masters degree at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK takes exactly this meshing together of different backgrounds in its course approach I believe.