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The Design Dilemma: Dismay vs. Delight
Designers can also evoke dismay with their ludicrous lack of knowledge of how things work. Engineers can also produce great beauty. Getting a good education in both disciplines is possible, practical and, to be honest, essential. At least, if you want products that work at all levels.
Now this was 30 years ago before anything like CAD was available to collegs
1. Art is not worth its weight unless there is skill in the craft
2. Design is not worth its weight unless its function is equal if not greater than its form.
I just saw it put well on here: http://joeyroth.com/about/ >> "Recognize that both irony and beauty are crutches for bad design. "
Thats something my mum would say.
I do enjoy reading your thoughts, and I think I can share your frustration that we don't seem to have the right model in the way we are approaching teaching in readiness for professional practice. Dave Gray's drawing is indeed brilliant, and that's the way I think we should be working, sharing our time between the specialist verticle strands and the interweaving, interdisciplinary horizontal ones - not trying to learn other people's jobs, but learning how to build things together with them.
This is exactly the underlying structure of my Product School project. This is a new model for teaching in HE for all the professions involved in the making of new products. It uses a 50/50 split between learning your job and working with everyone else, and leading to a double Degree, one in your area, and one in your ability to work with the others.
Love to chew this over with you sometime.
David
Blanket statements about our charming ignorance and naivete feels like a back handed compliment. If a designer doesn't know anything about the limitations and processes of what they are designing then they shouldn't be on your payroll. A good designer should have the creativity of an artist mixed with enough baseline engineering knowledge necessary for bringing a concept to life. I understand your angle in this article, but I don't a guy like Jonathan Ive is ignorant to engineering principles, and I would bet the design team at Ford knows how cars are made.