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UCSD, Parsons and the Cooper Hewitt
These harbingers of an expanded field are indeed exciting. When our department changed its name to Media Design Practices, we shifted our emphasis to emerging practices that are developing in response to increasingly unpredictable conditions. With our focus on ensuring that designers can thrive in non-design domains, we emphasize communication across cultural and disciplinary boundaries. We also foster an ability for designers to be able to articulate their expertise to diverse communities unfamiliar with design, from policy wonks to hotel workers. This requires that designers find better ways to engage directly with people and the world at large. Operating with "critical distance," keeping the world at arms length, is great for critique but not so good for action.
Anne, these are both interesting programs, and I imagine with interesting 'interminglings.' One of the challenges that design has is language and common understanding. This is the reason we felt it was important to deliberately locate discursive design within the broader range of design practice. The outcome was a four field approach--commercial, responsible, experimental, and discursive design--were it is not the what, or the how, but the why we design that became the basis of distinction. Since we introduced the framework formally in 2009, it has been generally well received and has weathered the test of time.
With this framework in mind, your Lab track seems to be quite consistent with the approach of discursive design--where the focus is on voice and discourse above utility. The Field track with project such as food deserts in Chicago and social justice interventions is more in line with responsible design practice with an emphasis on serving the underserved, largely through providing some utility or greater inclusivity or access.
Of course these four fields are not exclusive and there is overlap--commercial projects that have a discursive element, or experimental projects with a responsible element. This is what is interesting about having both the Field and Lab 'under one roof'--the potential for the discursive or experimental to influence the responsible, and vice versa, given the fundamental differences in their primary aims. I imagine that there can be some tension between the positions, that if cultivated well (and with some luck) can lead to exciting results that would not have been possible otherwise.
I agree that a broader understanding or acceptance of the roles and possibilities for discursive design as well as economics is important, especially in a public university. That said, as broad as art and design may potentially be, I can see the value in educational emphases and the freedom to intentionally exclude. Hopefully this is an informed choice, and one that is probably more appropriate at the graduate level. I hope that UCSD is at least open to a broader debate on the pros as well as the cons of economic relationships. The staunch notion of the "market as the enemy of good" is indeed simple-minded.
In Media Design Practices (MDP), we tackle this issue head on with two tracks that intermingle and challenge one another: Lab—which engages with future-oriented speculative work with emerging ideas from science, tech, culture—and Field, which integrates fieldwork in the Global South in addressing emerging ideas from science, tech, culture. artcenter.edu/mdp or watch this short film.
That UCSD, a university, have such a poor understanding of design (history, education and practice), that they are only interested in design when it is more like (aneconomic) art, is embarrassing - for UCSD and (speculative critical) Design.