What is our charge? What are we trying to do?

·       Student profiles? Their future Aspirations? Emerging global dimensions.

·       How is the profession changing? How do we best prepare the students?

·       We are a design profession and the quality of the student work is the acid test / remember, parents pay us to participate in insuring their children's future.

How do students learn? How should we teach?

·       We fine-tune curricula / we fine-tune studio structures and syllabi / we rarely examine how students learn, as well as our own teaching and review methodologies and performance.

·       Education of primary teachers  – 4 years with constant reviews.

·       École des Beaux-Arts.

·       Domains of learning / knowledge, attitude, skills.

·       Teacher training in our graduate programs / video-tape protocol.

·       Cognition

·       Learning theory.

·       MB & MMPA – personality profiles.

·       Small group behavior.

·       Leadership.

·       Interpersonal communication.

·       Active listening theory.

·       Neurophysiology of divergent thought / creative thinking.

Questions: 

·       What is “good design”?

·       How do you identify “good design”?

·       How do you do it?

·       Where do good ideas come from?

·       Objectify process as learnable.

·       Can creative thinking be taught?

Trust:

·       Students should trust that you are very good at what you profess.

·       They should trust that you have their best intentions at heart.

·       They should trust that you will do what you say.

·       They should trust that what you say is relevant to their future.... they are all in a search    of relevancy.

·       This is not "blind trust". This is trust earned everyday.

Recommendations:

The following is a brief summary of recommendations that could be made to most of the schools of design I have collaborated with. The recommendations are based upon forty years of teaching and research in design education - in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The assumption here is that students are primary, and the focus is on educating exceptional design professionals.

If you find relevance here and there .... that would be nice.

Teacher Training & Selection:

• Professional experience / practice / be a facile and fluent designer

• Coursework / training in:

• Interpersonal Communication

• Learning Theory / Domains of Learning

• Creative thinking / Convergent-Divergent

• Cognition

• Small Group Behavior

• Leadership

• Teaching Assistantship / Apprenticeship Learning

• Participate in video protocol studies / self-awareness

• Learn to recognize learning styles. Develop a repertoire of situational responses accordingly.

• Reflection on design process and ‘where good ideas come from’. Objectify this / ordering systems / sources of form etc.

• Hire carefully / very good designers / patient / good communicators / able to sublimate ego

Design Review in Studio and Juries:

• "Golden Rule": It’s not about you……

• Respect / Enthusiasm / Trust Building

• Do you believe that you can teach an individual to think creatively? If so, reflect on how this might best be accomplished.

• Listen and Build Ideas collaboratively. Generate multiple alternatives to illustrate your commentary / Accountable feedback - pass the pencil.

• Speak in Diagrams, and reduce “Architalk” to a minimum.

• Allow more autonomy / at the appropriate junctures, allow student programming / site selection / building type selection – this can build student accountability.

• Develop “Design Diary” methodologies

• Require multiple conceptual alternatives and synthesis very early in design process

• Define and discuss “good design” with many relevant case studies / use Socratic methodologies with the students to thoroughly analyze these.

• Build studio as an exceptional office environment – Individual then group work back and forth in all exercises. Embrace sharing – allow public domain ideas to flourish.

• Learn to create creative environments. Encourage risk-taking. Avoid overly harsh commentary / Listen effectively / build ideas collaboratively.

• Learn to recognize and respond to a variety of learning types.

• Use care in project selection / relevant, interdisciplinary, international, vertical can often become very good design environments for both early and later studios.

• Learn to use humor to deliver the “bad” news.

• Be aware of IB / RHET / ISSUEF / I’s / G&R BIAS / TALKT……

• Frequent interim and internal reviews – we want formative not summative feedback.

• Early project reviews in groups with later review occurring individually.

Curriculum:

• Accelerate / Integrate

• Embrace change in the profession.

• Integrate support curricula with studios – structures, graphics, systems, history – theory, etc.

• Revisit the first 3 semesters of our curricula – much seems outdated and irrelevant, i.e. dots and spots, basic engineering drafting, 3-point perspective, etc.

• Emphasize mastery of rapid hand concept-getting hand diagramming along with computer literacy and digital 3-D modeling throughout the curriculum.

• Reduce reliance on physical models.

• Hire very carefully. Develop multi-pronged vetting procedures.

• Revisit P & T guidelines and develop optional academic paradigms.

Educational Goals:

• Educational goals are fundamental to all educators and curricula. Without a cohesive and comprehensive definition of what `success' means in design education, all of the previous suggestions are merely cosmetic.

• The efficiency of task-oriented groups decreases when members do not perceive their goals uniformly. The author's experience, and our protocol study and national survey show that few design schools have formally addressed this issue.

• Each faculty member has his or her own definition of the `accomplished' designer, student, jury, project, teacher, juror, etc. These definitions are often vague, unarticulated, unexamined, and often subject to radical transformation, depending upon the design situation, the personalities involved, and the academic environment. Our suggestion is not to develop a rigid national definition of the `successful' design student, but for design schools and teachers to open a dialogue on educational goals, considering present and future attributes demanded by the societal, professional and intellectual forces in design education.

• A taxonomy of educational goals would focus on the changes which design educational experiences produce in individuals across cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning. It would provide a framework for, objectify, and more precisely define a common `design education language'. Different design schools, faculty members, and external jurors could then better communicate, share, evaluate, and build upon one another's ideas. With such a framework at hand, the dynamics of juries could alter dramatically: communication could become more explicit, comments more focused, and evaluation more fair. The design critic, student, and jurors would become more accountable, and expectations of the student work and presentations clearer.

•  The taxonomy could develop in three phases.

• First, appropriate design educational outcomes would need to be specified.

• Second, these outcomes would need to be given clear and precise enough definitions to enable communication among teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, researchers, and practitioners.

• Third, a consensus would need to be secured among the user group(s), i.e., design educators, administrators, design students, and professional practitioners.

• This complex and logistically arduous task could be eased by using multi-attribute utility matrices (or some sort of bivariate statistical analysis). The development of a multi-attribute utility matrix would require design educators to collaborate in selecting educational outcomes, and the weights assigned to each. In fact, just developing the initial survey matrix would help resolve some of the issues.

• The matrices could then be circulated among design educators for their suggested amendments to the attributes cross-tabulated, and for their estimate of the relative importance of each attribute. The results could then be totaled and correlated centrally. Although imposing national, or even regional norms could lead undue influence from special interest groups, professional organizations could jointly sponsor such a survey, viz., AIA, ACSA, and ASLA. Before all this could happen, we would need to define and discuss in depth what we are trying to do in design education, what society needs, and what the future holds for and demands of the profession. We would also need to discuss and evaluate how successful current design education philosophies and methods have been, a task that is difficult without clear educational goals. Perhaps some form of the registration board exams could be used as a beginning point for evaluating how successfully students have been educated. The results could provide us with at least a beginning point in the development of any classification of design educational goals.

• Suggestions generated here for improving behavior in juries involve a few basic concepts; notions of acceptable behavior that we are all familiar with, and ones that most of us assume we practice daily:

• having and showing respect for others

• the ability and disposition to listen to and understand the attitudes, feelings, and ideas of others

• mastery of collaborative idea-building

 

• the effective communication of complex ideas and recommendations; and sensitive / effective leadership skills. They are all simple tools, verging on the simplistic, but so easily neglected in `the heat of the moment'. As educators, we may hesitate to acknowledge that we are remiss in the application of any of these attributes concerning our students and colleagues.

There is a tendency to underestimate this material, in that listening and respect are assumed to be `just common sense'. It is difficult to perceive oneself as `disrespectful’, or as consistently careless with the feelings and ideas of others, but our videotapes show how often we are so. The power of the concepts and skills discussed in this chapter to promote trusting relationships, enhance creative thought and behavior, and diminish counterproductive communications habits is considerable.

This research reveals few solutions that are easy or quick. Irresponsible behavior often is habitual and virtually unconscious. It therefore requires time, patience, and devotion to correct. We have made research based suggestions for alleviating counterproductive behavior, and facilitating task-oriented performance in groups. Subsequent research will need to examine how well these recommendations translate into the needs of design education and design juries.