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2004 Eastman National IDSA Education Conference October 24-26, 2004 Art Center College of Design Pasadena, California by Bruce M. Tharp

Would you like to see some of the 100+ photos I took at the IDSA education conference? Me too! Unfortunately a busboy at the Villa Sorriso restaurant in Pasadena decided to keep them all for himself. Only minutes after finishing dinner, the evening after the conference was over, I realized that I left my camera on the table. Despite my $100 reward no one at the restaurant knew what I was talking about. Where has all the love gone? Since Villa Sorriso stole my photos I have stolen these photos of their dastardly restaurant staff from their website. (Actually they are a much nicer lot to look at than the design educators-but that still does not make it right!) So it was a bad ending to an otherwise good conference. Every year I say that it is better than the last and at the risk of sounding like some kind of chump, I say it again. It was three days of rich, sweet content on design and design pedagogy. If you care about the future of design (and if, like Whitney, you believe that the children are our future) then it matters what educators be talkin’ ‘bout. Two themes seemed to dominate much of the discussion. The first is of little surprise—China. Did you know that China graduates over 8,000 industrial designers each year from their 219 design programs? Ten years ago there were fewer than 20 ID programs there, so something is obviously afoot. And that foot be big. Further, more U.S. and European faculty are being wooed by Chinese schools, most notably Lorraine Justice (formerly Dept. Chair at Georgia Tech) and John Heskett (formerly at the Illinois Institute of Technology and author of Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life) who are both now at Hong Kong Polytechnic . IDSA President, Bruce Claxton, talked about his recent experiences there and showed some work by Chinese designers and students. Form-wise their work was just as good as top designs you would find anywhere in the world—so don’t think they aren’t capable. However, he did mention that their emphasis on research and the broader design picture was not quite on par. Give them a couple of years and you might see Chinese design ethnographers at a mall near you. Two papers from designers of Chinese persuasion were also presented. Xiangyang Xin (Carnegie Mellon) presented Chinese Design and Design Education and Elaine Ann (Kaizor Innovation), along with Eric Wear and Carmen Tsui (both of Hong Kong Polytechnic) presented a fascinating look into Chinese homes with their paper New Product Development Opportunities: Research on Domestic Consumption by the New Middle Class of South China. Particularly intriguing was the ‘clothing’ that some Chinese purchase to cover their washers and driers. They basically look like printed bed sheets with elastic around the edges that fit nicely over the body and top of the appliances. This, we are told is not for fashion, but because washers and driers (along with other such consumer goods) are highly valued and are status symbols of sorts. They cover them to protect them from getting scratched up. Aside from such encounters with product exotics, the real issue is whether China poses an opportunity or a threat. Many see the burgeoning industrial design profession as a behemoth that will eventually displace western designers. Others see the inevitable growth of a Chinese middle class a huge market opportunity for western goods. Undoubtedly both will occur to some extent. The other hot issue, near and dear to my heart, had to do with design research. The conference was kicked off by a talk given by Steve Wilcox, PhD of Design Science. His talk was polemically entitled, Why Designers Can’t Do Valid Research and it was successfully incendiary. He challenges designers to distinguish between doing ethnography and just hanging out watching people. The gist of his argument is that Research (big “R”) is the stuff of scientists who are particularly trained in theory and method. The academically accepted requirements of research measurement include validity and reliability. In other words, are your research findings both predictive of future behavior and could others follow the same research protocol and get the same results? He is probably correct in his assertion that designers not rigorously trained in scientific theory and method are ill fit for this type of research. But would they want to do that kind of research? Wilcox was quick to add that designers are good at design and if they were to be pushed into a tighter scientific role then their value would drastically diminish. His point is let designers design and leave the Research to the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, ergonomists, etc. And, designers should not claim to be experts in Research. In the other corner…Brenda Laural of Art Center and author of Design Research. She is someone who successfully does design research (note the little “r”) and teaches it. She is adamant that indeed designers can and should engage in research activities. Of course the debate here is really about what IS research. Does research have to be valid (predictive) to be useful? Can’t the design process be both informed and inspired by designers engaging in some process of understanding the humans that interact with their artifacts? Of course this is more complex—there are issues of exploratory research and evaluative research as well as myriad methodologies (eg. traditional/non-traditional focus groups, field ethnography, video ethnography, ethnofuturism, immersion, remote ethnography, interviewing, persona development, etc.). What this conference did was get designers thinking about how and why research is done and if, when, why, and how they engage their students in research. Such debates are healthy and indeed necessary for such a nascent discipline. If you are a designer, educator, practicioner, or design student interested in the big picture, then you should consider attending next year’s NEC. And if you do, hold on to your camera at dinner. Below is a list of the papers/talks that were presented at the conference. Be sure to check the IDSA website for when they will put the papers online. Why Designers Can't Do Valid Research Steve Wilcox Design Science Design, Ethics and Humanism Christian Guellerin L'Ecole De Design Getting the Most Out of Design Josh Cohen Ratner & Prestia Assistive Devices for High School Students Pascal Malassigne Milwaukee Institute of A&D Understanding Beauty Uday Gajender BEA Systems Industry Support for Sponsored Projects Richard Fry Brigham Young U. Production for Sustainable Products Cagla Dogan & Stuart Walker U. Of Calgary Visual Storyboarding Kevin Reeder Georgia Institute of Technology The Influence of Computing Technologies Stephanie Munson U. of Illinois at Chicago Interdisciplinary Product Development Stephen Melamed Tres Design Group Undergraduate Universal Design Instructions Lorraine Justice Hong Kong Polytechnic U. Cane Makes Able: Universal Design James Arnold   Collaboration and Entrepreneurship Paul Rothstein Arizona State U. Finding ID Educational Funding Percy Hooper North Carolina State U. Sustainability, Natural Step for Designers Mandana MacPherson The Natural Step Chinese Design and Design Education Xiangyang Xin Carnegie Mellon U. Initiating Beginning Design Students Stephen Temple U. of Texas S.A. Experiences in Creative Thinking Paul Skaggs Brigham Young U. Pragmatic & Intuitive Design Mark Baskinger & Ki-chol Nam Carnegie Mellon U. Dissident Design: Resistance via Form Craig Badke & Stuart Walker U. of Calgary British Industrial Design Education Deana McDonagh & David Weightman. U. of Illinois U.C. Back to the Future Peter Wolf Arizona State U. Technology in the Wildest Possible Sense Barry Wylant U. of Calgary Form and Function Follow Culture William Calvo Arizona State U. Free Enterprise or Social Responsibility Andy Loewy Loewy Design Group Beautiful Beings: Aesthetics in Industrial Design Prasad Boradkar Arizona State U. Death of Banality, Birth of Experience Martin Bunce Tin Horse, Inc. Cultural Modifiers of Visual Aesthetics Ron Kemnitzer Virginia Tech Thinking and Drawing with the Tablet PC John Caruso U. of Notre Dame Small Business Innovation Research Grants Don Herring Arizona State U. Design Research: Methods and Perspectives Brenda Laurel Art Center College A Product Design Studio for Non-Designers Jim Kaufman Ohio State U. Value through Dispossession Bruce M. Tharp Haworth, Inc. Asian Influences on European Educational Design Simon Bolton U. of the Arts, London Managing Complex Problems in Design John McClusky San Jose State U. Improving the Design Concept Process Ilkka Kettunen U. of Lapland Materials & Processes Tim Fletcher & Warren Ginn Elumens, Corp. Industrial Design Fundamentals Eric Anderson Carnegie Mellon U. Criteria for Excellence in Design Education Lauren McDermott Arizona State U. New Product Development Opportunities in China Elaine Ann & Eric Wear Kaizen, Inc. & Hong Kong Poly Bruce M. Tharp is currently a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago and works for Haworth's thinktank--the Ideation Group--helping to bridge the gap between research and design solutions. In addition to an MA in Anthropology, he holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Bucknell University and an MID from Pratt Institute.

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