January 21, 2021

Unlearning

(Learning)

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela The working context of the contemporary designer is shifting radically along with the very criteria that define a professional practice in design. Design is decisively situated within increasing overall complexity in technology, economy, politics, and culture. It is this very situatedness that exerts pressure on design students, the design academies that produce them, and the firms that hire and cultivate them. Emerging designers exposed to the brunt of this disconnect between learning and practicing. Due to the exponentially increasing speed of the diffusion of innovation and the fact that design infuses all sectors, professional design, like medicine has seen the proliferation of greater specialization of design expertise. Access is a real issue. As the educational sphere faces ever increasing tuition costs and spiraling student debt many aspiring designers are priced out of the opportunity to earn a design education.

We are living through a crisis of meaning within the university and a clash of cultures regarding the purpose and value of higher education. Our maturing higher educational learning models are increasingly challenged to be relevant to contemporary realities and to the diverse learning dispositions of students. Having been disconnected from real-world needs and from the pace of change, the educational sphere, now in crisis, is motivated to reach beyond its former boundaries and to reengage with society. Higher education is being challenged to be more relevant and permeable -even outward facing - toward society, while professional design practice and industry are likewise being called upon to apply theories and to ground projects in research. The opposite pole of this intrinsic - extrinsic values dyad is the increasingly vocational turn of university education that neglects the intrinsic value of learning for its own sake.

On the level of cultural pedagogy, we face the shadow of the profession, our roles and our interdependencies. This suggests a softening of the self reflexivity of the academic orientation. The design education sector is adapting to complex demands that broaden our understandings of what constitutes capacity in a professional designer. Assessment structures with learning goals for pedagogical “production” of designers have to be balanced with dispositions of active inquiry and mutual discovery. Design education is moving from problem solving (reactive, needs oriented) to problem context reframing, to opportunity finding (proactive, striving oriented) for richer decision opportunity creation. Pedagogy is moving from product (unilinear delivery modes, and outcomes orientations) to process (multivalent modes tailored to individual learning styles).

Higher education needs a renewed contract with youth who are really quite capable of working, but only in the context of meaning, vital connection, and giving back. Conventional design education will adapt and retool radically or face the prospect of being supplanted by more relevant, agile, and affordable learning platforms that are currently proliferating alternatives. Academic institutions are exploring forms of situated civic engagement as potentially valid sites of learning and knowledge production and investing resources in routes like service learning, action research and hybrid forms of partnership with corporate and civic entities. Obstacles and challenges to overcome include rigid industry norms as well as pedagogical and disciplinary norms such as the primacy of the cultures of intellectual polarization and competition that leave little room for interiority and cooperation.

Amazing new models demonstrate that academia and industry are finding ways to align and partner to advance shared purposes. As the need for synergies between the academic and workplace spheres becomes more evident, productive partnerships are being developed in order to achieve positive real-world impact. There is increasing acknowledgment that intense learning takes place both in the classroom and in the workplace. Along with this comes understanding that contemporary practice requires professionals who are creative lifelong learners rather than technicians, balanced with the awareness that professional best practices and competencies determine the quality of our world. Because design thinking does call for capacities that had not been essential for the practice of professional design in more traditional fields such as product object and service design, design thinking has been an expansive stimulus to the design pedagogical system.

Anne-Marie Willis, with partner and fellow design theorist Tony Fry co-founded the Australian Eco-Design Foundation and later the online peer-reviewed journal Design Philosophy Papers, and Design Philosophy Politics as well as ZoonTechnica: The Journal of Redirective Design an online journal on design and the becoming of homo sapiens that resulted from the development and teaching of design futures at the Design Department of Queensland College of Art (QCA) of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Their Re-directive Practice, stresses the formative and conditioning nature of the built world and conventional design pedagogy, or ‘education in error’ (Fry 140).1 The term ‘re-directive practitioner’ applies to creative practitioners in any discipline. Re-directive Practice seeks touch points of authentic change value, always looking to generate models, leverage, and scalability where applicable. ‘Re-directive practitioner’ describes real shifts of identity and praxis.

As practicing artists and designers take up this challenge in authentic ways, they will reinvent the very practice of cultural work, while enriching a field of inquiry about society that challenges existing practices of social design, responsible innovation, an sociotechnical change. In his recent trilogy of prescient books, Design Futuring, Design as Politics,2 and Design and Becoming Human, Tony Fry articulates strategies for would-be designers of the future including designing-in-time, designing for elimination, platforming, re-coding of typologies and metro-fitting —the designed moving of whole cities in advance of an era Fry envisions as the evolutionary age of “post-settlement” requiring of a new ’Urmadic’3 ( a synthesis of ancient and nomadic) ways of living, being and designing.4 Fry’s Studio at the Edge of the World is an experimental transdisciplary laboratory for re-directive design of the identity and societal role of the university. As a new kind of educational exploration of edge conditions based in the wilds of Tasmania, studio at the edge of the world focuses on the creation of learning events in the context of a redirective design think-tank for partnerships with education institutions, government, NGOs and associates.

As educators, the human systems we touch are the design agents of the future. The complexity of our world demands cooperation and collaboration at levels of the system higher than the discrete spheres of education or entrepreneurship. The demands of practicing design in a complex world necessitate inter-systemic partnerships to prepare young designers not just to be relevant and not just to fit into existing professional worlds, but to also be equipped to challenge those worlds from within. In making the transition from the design academy to professional practice, young designers traverse radically disparate values spheres. Equipped with adequate mental models of their own learning process they will be better able to discern what they learn from how they learn and why they learn.

  1. Fry, Tony. Design Futuring. p. ( )↩︎

  2. Fry, Tony, Design as Politics. ( )↩︎

  3. Fry, Tony. Urmadic University from “Design Action, Leadership and the Future” http://www.theodessey.org/#↩︎

  4. Fry, Tony. Urmadic University from “Design Action, Leadership and the Future” http://www.theodessey.org/#↩︎




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