Innovation Winter 2014: Education Evaluation

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

WINTER 2014

Education Evaluation

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TRENDS n

EDUCATION SHOWCASE

The Nature of Innovation.

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

WINTER 2014 速

Publisher IDSA 555 Grove St., Suite 200 Herndon, VA 20170 P: 703.707.6000 F: 703.787.8501 www.innovationjournal.org www.idsa.org

Executive Editor Mark Dziersk, FIDSA Managing Director LUNAR | Chicago mark@lunar.com

Sr. Creative Director Karen Berube IDSA 703.707.6000 x102 karenb@idsa.org

Advertising Katrina Kona IDSA 703.707.6000 x100 katrinak@idsa.org

Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus

Subscriptions/Copies Jill Richardson IDSA 703.707.6000 x118 jillr@idsa.org

jennifer@wordcollaborative.com

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The quarterly publication of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), INNOVATION provides in-depth coverage of design issues and long-term trends while communicating the value of design to business and society at large.

Annual Subscriptions Within the US $70 Canada & Mexico $85 International $125 Single Copies Fall/Yearbook All others

$40+ S&H $20+ S&H

DESIGN EDUCATION 21 The Expanding Role of Design Education

by Lorraine Justice, FIDSA

FEATURES

22 Designing the Future of Education

by Juan Antonio Islas Munoz, Kyrsten Sanderson and Cecilia Arredondo

by Ayse Birsel, IDSA

24

Beyond Collaboration Cross-Training Integrated Innovators as a New Educational Model

52 Natural Partners Design & Medicine 55 IDSA Student Chapter Showcase sponsored by College for Creative Studies

PATRONS OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EXCELLENCE INVESTOR IDEO, Palo Alto, CA; Shanghai, China; Cambridge, MA; London, UK; San Francisco; Munich, Germany; Chicago; New York Newell Rubbermaid, Atlanta, GA Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, OH

IN EVERY ISSUE

Webb deVlam Chicago, Chicago, IL

by Eric Anderson, FIDSA

4 IDSA HQ

26 Exploring the Next Wave

by Daniel Martinage, CAE

CULTIVATOR

by Jim Budd, IDSA, Kevin Shankwiler, IDSA and James Hallam

6 From the Editor

Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL

31 Interdisciplinarity in Design Education Benefits & Challenges

8 Business Concepts

by Bob Fisher

by Lauren McDermott, IDSA, Prasad Boradkar and Renu Zunjarwad

35 From Evangelist to Educator

by Warren Ginn, FIDSA

39 Specialized Research Courses for Design Undergraduates

by Katherine Bennett, IDSA and Elizabeth Sanders

42 Design (Learning) is the Future of Education

By Sunand Bhattacharya, IDSA and Doris Wells-Papanek, IDSA

44 Engaging Municipalities Locality in Design Studios

by Jason O. Germany, IDSA

48 Design Education by the Numbers | The 2013 – 2014 Education Survey

by Pascal Malassigné, FIDSA, Sooshin Choi, IDSA, Thomas Amerson, Krista Alley, Soojin Kim and Kevin Alexander

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

WINTER 2014

INNOVATION EDUCATION EVALUATION

Education Evaluation

by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

10 Book Review

by Paul Hatch, IDSA 11 Letter to the Editor 12 Design Defined

by Bruce M. Tharp, IDSA and Stephanie M. Tharp

14 Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

18 A Look Back

by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA

85 Showcase 88 ID+ME

by George Daniels, L/IDSA

Statement of Ownership Publication: Innovation Publication Number: Vol. 33, No. 4 Filing Date: 10/7/14 Issue Frequency: Quarterly No. of Issues Published Annually: 4 Annual Subscription Rate: $70 Domestically, $125 Internationally Mailing Address: 555 Grove Street, Suite 200 Herndon, VA 20170 Mailing Address for Headquarters: Same as above Owner & Publisher: Industrial Designers Society of America, 555 Grove Street, Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170 Managing Editor: Karen Berube Issue Date for Circulation Data: 6/21/14

Cover photo: Sketch by Sergey Nivens.

WINTER 2014

STATE OF EDUCATION n

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EDUCATION SHOWCASE

INNOVATION is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. INNOVATION is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. INNOVATION (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170.

Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2014 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 33, No. 4, 2014; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

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For more information about becoming a Patron and supporting IDSA’s communication and education outreach, please contact Katrina Kona at 703.707.6000 x100.

Ave. Year Single Total Number of Copies: 3,650 3,500 Paid/Requested outside county: 2,750 2,454 Paid in county: 0 0 Sales through dealers/carriers: 188 117 Other classes mailed through USPS: 270 312 Total paid: 3,208 2,883 Free distribution mailed through USPS: 0 0 Total nonrequested distribution distribution: 0 0 Total distribution: 3,208 2,883 Copies not distributed: 441 617 Total: 3,649 3,500

Advertisers’ Index 5 2015 IDEA Opens 1-5-15 c3 Autodesk 17 Autodesk 84 College for Creative Studies 87 Design Intelligence c4 LUNAR c2 Pip Tompkin 1 Proto Labs 20 Stamps School of Art & Design

I D S A HQ

EXPANDING OUR VOICE T he end of the year is always an interesting mix of old and new at IDSA as we wrap up the year’s programs and prepare for next year’s cycle. It’s been an exciting year with a host of new and expanded programs, including the Good Design = Good Business webinar series, the record-breaking International Conference in Austin and thought-provoking District Design Conferences, as well as the hugely successful inaugural Medical Design Conference, which was held in early November. By the time this issue of INNOVATION is published, our new website will have launched and we will have kicked off the official celebration marking IDSA’s 50th anniversary and IDEA’s 35th anniversary.

IDSA’s new website culminates more than a year of intensive planning and building, representing a significant shift in how the staff and leadership communicate and interact with our members and the larger industrial design community. IDSA has continuously published several audience-specific publications, including designBytes, studentBytes and Member News. Beginning in the new year, much of the content in these publications will transition into the main information flow on our website, creating a more content-rich and relevant experience for all visitors. The main landing page on our website is designed as a virtual white board with news and events scrolling in real time. Our intent is to become the go to source for relevant information that is generated by a broader and more diversified cross section of industrial designers and key stakeholders. We are particularly excited to launch a section of the website called “What is ID?” that offers prospective design students, parents and the public at-large a greater understanding of the field of industrial design. As this section is expanded throughout the year, we would love to hear your impressions and suggestions.

The end of the year also marks the beginning of the academic year for our student chapters, and this issue of INNOVATION celebrates their accomplishments with onepage visual representations of more than 25 IDSA student chapters. IDSA is deeply committed to our student chapters and the academic institutions that industrial design students attend. At a recent Student Pow Wow in New York City, more than 60 students gathered to explore how to cre-

ate more meaningful relationships between students from all area schools, not just from within individual schools. In mid-November, the student officers of Virginia Tech’s IDSA student chapter organized and conducted a program with portfolio reviews, including 18 professionals and a featured speaker. This event convened six of the 10 schools in the Southern District together to support networking and career development. Over the next several months IDSA will reexamine current guidelines for student chapters with an eye toward breaking down barriers to encourage greater student representation regionally. We will also be looking at ways to further publicize and promote winners of the Student Merit Awards.

An important part of recognizing IDSA’s 50th anniversary involves setting a firm strategic direction for our next 50 years. To help frame and execute this vision, IDSA is strengthening our public relations and outreach because we have a lot to say and we need the help of the entire industrial design community to spread the word. Every voice counts, so stay tuned!

—Daniel Martinage, CAE, IDSA Executive Director danielm@idsa.org

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F RO M T HE E DI TOR

POINT OF VIEW I t is a true privilege to present this issue of INNOVATION focused on the current state of design education. There is much to be proud of in the level of excellence in design education today. I speak as both a professional and an educator. I have been visiting and working with schools a lot lately in addition to adjunct teaching a graduate course on design for the last 12 years at Northwestern. This last year alone I attended three IDSA District conferences and visited six separate schools to lecture, advise and review programs.

I watched each school’s IDSA Student Merit winner’s presentation—an empowering and optimistic experience, to be sure. In the process, I have made the following observations about design education.

Firstly, perhaps stating the obvious, the faculty are the true core to every student’s design education. The first strength of any program is the professors, and their engagement in and attention to lessons and the curriculum.

Obvious deep concern for the students and the school is a must. Excellent representation of the school’s philosophy and a demand for excellence from each student are necessities. The faculty are also expressions of excellence as ambassadors for the school in multiple domains, including among academics and within the design and business communities. Great faculty emphasize storytelling, celebrate the individuality of each student, put students first, are strong thinkers and continue to push students to excel across the board. Exceptional faculty go the extra mile in addressing student needs and being hands-on with teaching and nurturing and, at the same time, strongly uphold expectations about excellence. The clear commitment of the design faculty and interaction with the department chair help determine a program’s excellence.

The learning environment is important as well. Facilities can define a school. Most of the schools I visited have terrific shared spaces for the teaching of design. That said,

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most industrial design schools, especially those in cities, fight for premium real estate and can sometimes give the impression of industrial design learning spaces as transient and public, and not particularly attuned to the discipline. I think schools should also consider creating private areas, nooks and coves that can be used by both students and faculty as thinking spaces—places that allow for deep thought and contemplation. Such places would invite one-on-one interaction around research and design activities and allow project drawings and images to remain posted for a while to invite intimate discussion and sharing. Some schools I have visited have addressed this notion by being clever about customizing presentation spaces with easels that store and cubbies that students can own.

The programs I visited pretty much all had wellequipped industrial design studios, especially the computer labs. But what about the many other places on campus or in the surrounding city or town that might be used by design classes to allow students to experience different environments? Space affects learning, and too much time in any one building or place could narrow the point of view of students. A campus defines a school, and the design curriculum should fully leverage the campus, whether urban or rural, as much as possible. Use a beautiful or meaningful part of the campus to introduce an assignment or engage in a crit, for example.

Next comes what is taught. Sketching, model building and prototyping skills will always be at the core of design education. In this regard my visits did not disappoint.

Everywhere student strengths were evident in model building, sketching, and exciting renderings and visualizations.

That said, one thing I do see a lot of is a similarity in the way students present their work. The Apple-esque product as hero against white. The jumble of quick sketches meant to show process and sketching ability that also communicate,

“While collaboration has its role in design and business, it is important to remember that a deep

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expertise in design is the most important skill and the mastery of it, the most valuable achievement. well, really nothing. How do you see anything in that freefor-all? While processes and tools are helpful to achieve and present results, it is also valuable to think about promoting individuality in the students’ approach to design and the presentation of their work. At IDSA District conferences, student posters are almost always formatted identically and are usually also full of too much imagery and consequently, ironically, are actually not very effective at presenting the uniqueness or essence of a student’s work. To be fair, this formatted approach is found at many, many schools and at almost every IDSA District conference. Still, I find myself drawn more to uniqueness and less to codified techniques, although this is not to say that collaboration is in any way wrong.

The idea of designers as T-shaped people—deep in a discipline but with an understanding and desire to collaborate across all disciplines—is an important concept.

But while collaboration has its role in design and business, it is important to remember that a deep expertise in design is the most important skill and the mastery of it, the most valuable achievement. In the business of consulting, we face the same equation—how to not lose the “I”-ness that makes a designer special when collaborating. Said another way—how to put more of the “I” back in T-shaped people.

We do it by encouraging and rewarding individuality and some edginess in designs and presentations. Being edgy in college is especially important in that risk taking and progressive learning are such an important part of the experience.

Sponsored projects can provide simulated real-world experiences with much to be gained, but they can also eat up valuable learning time in being engaged in activities that result in safer work that is acceptable to clients. In school, on both the technical and the aesthetic side of design, there is room for more unconventional exploration. It’s a place and time to learn to be inspiring and unique, as opposed to engaging in everyday designing experiences. Every year in the design

class I teach to non-designers in the master’s program at Northwestern, I tell my students one thing on the first day of class: no PowerPoint presentations. If you use PowerPoint you will flunk this course. After the initial fluster subsides, something brilliant happens: imagination. They rise to the task. The worst presentations from my students blow away 99 percent of safe and similar PowerPoint presentations. In my travel to various schools, I suppose I would have like to have seen more edginess.

It is my feeling that projects in college should also strive to create answers that help humanity as well as business concerns and that engage in projects of extreme social significance. School is a great place for students to learn about boundaries and be encouraged to push themselves far. You don’t get those chances every day in practice.

School should be a time for creating truly daring projects that defy the norm and putting them out into the world for all to see. Smart thinking that can change the way we live for the better.

Believe me when I say that there is plenty of evidence of smart thinking going on. If there were one word I would use to describe what I have seen from the current state of design schools it would be impressive. Work is achieving professional standards, classes are robust and full, and department chairs have their hands full on every account.

This issue was guest edited by a dean and department head, Lorraine Justice, FIDSA of Rochester Institute of Technology, who has her hands full but nevertheless generously donated her time and expertise. Lorraine, who I have known and admired almost my entire design and IDSA career, has assembled an enormously talented group of writers and contributors who will no doubt prove that design in America today is engaged, healthy and thriving.

IDSA thanks Lorraine for her tireless efforts to both this issue and design education.

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

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www

BU S I NE SS CO NCE PTS

Rate your satisfaction with the state of industrial design education in the United States today.

RANKING AMERICA’S BEST ID SCHOOLS Dissatisfied 3.8%

Are students graduating with an adequate standing of material life cycles, recycling design for disassembly, environmental im materials and processes, and ecodesign p

More than adequat understanding

Inadequate Very satisfied Neutral ccording to the US Bureau of methods for understanding training them. Those who 6.3% Labor Statistics, there were wish to pursue an education in design 9.4% 18.9% 22.2% approximately 39,200 jobs in have complex options to consider.

How industrial design in 2012, compared to are they to determine which program will 107,400 in architecture and 259,500 in best prepare them to practice not only graphic design. Though the numbers of in the familiar environment of today, but industrial design practitioners may seem also in the rapidly evolving future? small, the impact of the profession has been huge. In recent years, companies Methodology and Approach like Apple, Target, Fab, Warby Parker The annual America’s Best Architecture 71.4% 67.9% Adeq and IKEA have differentiated themselves & Design Schools is intended to provide under by making good design accessible at a prospective students, their parents and mass scale. Organizations like IDEO and others who are interested in design Satisfied Stanford’s d.school have built awareness education with information to help them Rate your satisfaction with the state and appreciation of design thinking as evaluate the relative strengths of proof ID education in the US today. a powerful method of solving problems. grams in four of the design disciplines: As technology continues to transform our lives, industrial architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and your firm an infusion Is it beneficial to your firm when recent designers will play an increasingly Is important role.benefiting fromindustrial design.

DesignIntelligence conducts thenew annual on of new ideas about sustainability from graduate hiressurvey had study abroad The Changing Environment of Industrial

behalf of the Design Futures Council.

It focuses on three key recent graduate new hires? experience while they were in school?

Design Practice and Education perspectives in order to develop a fuller picture of educaIn the book Trillions, the founders of the ID firm MAYA Design tional institutions: describe a world in which technology merges with objects 1. Hiring firms (leaders and practitioners who have responand the built environment to create a multitude of interconsibility for hiring or supervising design professionals) It doesn’t really nected matter—often called the Internet of Things (IoT).

2. Deans and department or program chairs (offering the benefit our firm The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2025 the IoT educators’ perspective on which programs are most I could have an approximately $2.7–6.2 trillion impact on the admired and why) 19.1% t global economy. Companies such as Cisco, which has more 3. Students (who are asked to rate their satisfaction with 39.7% than 74,000 employees, have thrown their significant weight the program in which they are enrolled) behind the idea of Internet of Everything (an extension of the Yes 50.8% 49.2% IoT) and are positioning themselves to leadNo the transition.

This year, 1,426 professional practice organizations, 97 As the integration of technology with objects and the deans and department or program chairs, and 3,840 stubuilt environment deepens, smart objects will require greater dents participated in the research for all four disciplines. interaction with users. Those who have the right talent and We asked about various dimensions of 41.3% educational training will be needed to create new forms of interaction programs such as communication, technology, cross-disbetween people and smart objects. Industrial designers who ciplinary teamwork, design, research and theory, as well as It’s somewhat adapt to this new paradigm will be in great demand. sustainable design practices andbeneficial principles. to Survey results As the role of industrial designers changes to match are presented separately and can beour triangulated to get a firm technology and the market, so too must the means and more robust image of the institution or program.

A

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“Simply picking a highly ranked school from a list may not be the wisest way to choose a

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place of study. Each design program, like each student, is multifaceted and unique.

Results Overall, leaders and hiring professionals appear to be satisfied with the state of industrial design education in the US today. Nearly 87 percent were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied,” though just below 19 percent gave the highest rating.

Top 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

undergraduate programs according to hiring firms: University of Cincinnati Art Center College of Design Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) Rhode Island School of Design Carnegie Mellon University and College for Creative Studies

Top 1.

4.

graduate programs according to hiring firms: Rhode Island School of Design Georgia Institute of Technology and Art Center College of Design Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University

Most admired undergraduate programs according to deans and chairs: 1. University of Cincinnati 2. Philadelphia University and Rhode Island School of Design and Virginia Tech 5. Arizona State University and

Art Center College of Design and Carnegie Mellon University and Pratt Institute Most admired graduate industrial design programs according to deans and chairs: 1. Carnegie Mellon University 2. Cranbrook Academy of Art and Illinois Institute of Technology 4. Pratt Institute and Rhode Island School of Design

Generally speaking, students expressed high levels of satisfaction with their programs. Close to 92 percent of respondents gave their program a grade of “excellent” or “above average,” and 94 percent believe they will be well prepared for their profession upon graduation.

The Big Caveat Simply picking a highly ranked school from a list may not be the wisest way to choose a place of study. Each design program, like each student, is multifaceted and unique.

While the DesignIntelligence surveys can be a powerful help in evaluating options, no ranking system can capture everything that makes a school the best choice. Each prospective student will likely be happiest choosing the program that is most compatible with his or her personality, interests and educational goals.

Other criteria to consider include: • Philosophy and culture of the program • Composition and qualifications of the faculty • Location and quality of facilities • Availability of co-ops and internships • Scholarship and tuition assistance options • Availability of community engagement and international

study experiences • Quality of campus life and school community • Quality of student work It’s quite possible that the best option may be one of the unranked programs. The key is to look at the whole picture—remembering that the rankings from DesignIntelligence or any other organization are but one part. While the decision between educational institutions may seem fraught with complexity, take heart: There are many good options to match every type of student. As the importance of the industrial design field grows, the need for passionate, talented and well-educated designers will accelerate.

—Bob Fisher, Principal, Greenway Group bfisher@greenway.us

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BO O K RE V I E W

Insights and Provocations from Design and Thought Leaders

BRAND THINKING AND OTHER NOBLE PURSUITS

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’ve wasted too much time reading superficial brand and marketing books that proclaim how a new approach to shouting at people will change the world. Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits by Debbie Millman is not one of those books.

Debbie Millman, known for dynamic podcast interviews, doesn’t shy away from interjecting her considerable knowledge and thoughtful opinions throughout her interviews in order to keep the conversation flowing. Part brand-focused, part biographical, and always straying into tangential topics that provide additional insight into the interviewees, this substantive collection of interviews echoes that distinctive style.

The majority of these experts don’t hail from industrial design, but rather from the worlds of branding and graphics, which provides a refreshing frame of reference for those of us on the other side of the brand triangle. An industrial designer will find these more holistic discussions of branding—many of which come from the industry’s most respected and influential design leaders—just as valuable and relevant as those that delve into the field of industrial design itself.

Compiling so many unique voices into a single tome requires a brevity that sometimes truncates topics that bear further examination, but this is a small sacrifice to concede for the wide range of viewpoints Millman was able to gather.

Many of those diverse viewpoints are contradictory, allowing readers to weigh the opinions and come to their own conclusions.

Bill Moggridge, FIDSA, Dan Formosa and Karim Rashid, IDSA fly the flag for industrial design, of course, and experienced writers like Dan Pink, Tom Peters and Malcolm Gladwell weigh in with their customary savvy, but some of the most interesting insights come from fields that might be less familiar to many designers. Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall, for example, covers a variety of rich topics from human evolution to culture, stating quite succinctly that “design translates values into tangible experiences.”

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Like the word “design,” “brand” is a broad, amorphous term that yields a variety of definitions that, in turn, reveal something insightful about the person defining it.

Rashid responds that a brand is a business with an identity—no identity, no brand. He elaborates by describing himself as having an identity, but not a brand. Gladwell suggests we set aside the term “brand” entirely in favor of finding more specific words.

Brian Collins takes a difDesign translates ferent approach, stating that values into tangible brands are stories: “Stories are how we give meaning to what happens to us. When experience. we call upon them, they activate archetypes—‘archetypes’ as defined by Carl Jung.

They remind us of eternal truths, and they help us navigate through our lives.”

Collins also points out that many people consider Apple a rebel brand: “But if you actually look back, Apple is really Eve. Apple is the seductress. You can see this manifested most prominently in the iPad, and it’s also evident in all the comments people made about it: ‘It feels like I have to have a cigarette when I’m finished with it’; ‘It’s sexy’; ‘It’s beautiful.’ The iPad is an erotic machine, you’re explicably attracted to it.”

Phil Duncan of P&G feels that connecting a brand with a mission is essential: “I believe we have a powerful responsibility to do something constructive with the affinity we have with consumers.”

Stanley Hainsworth of Starbucks and Nike fame also speaks of the importance of story as part of the vision or

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Dohner and Kostellow strategy: “Microsoft is a good example of a brand that’s never told its story well. It’s a huge consumer product software platform, a mega conglomerate, and there’s no love there. There’s no emotional story to rally around. The Bill Gates story is such an incredible story, but has never really been expressed by the brand.”

Wally Olins, considered by some the godfather of branding, defines the term as a “profound manifestation of the human condition. It is about belonging: belonging to a tribe, to a religion, to a family.” He goes on to point out that branding is often used superficially to differentiate between otherwise dissimilar consumer products, but should reside in more complex systems such as behavioral characteristics and experience. His interview stands out as particularly insightful, discussing the aspirations of consumers and corporations, strategic creativity and the failings of brand research: “In order to be truly imaginative, you must possess an unusual level of self-confidence and creativity. Most branding consultants today … wrap themselves up in analyses, in jargon, in pretend statistical data that is comforting and gets them well-paid but it is meaningless. I deeply reject all that and find it to be a contemporary version of witchcraft.”

The interview process brings a level of candidness that imparts a clear sense of what is real and a glimpse of individual personalities. Bruce Duckworth explains how he gets personally pulled into the aspirations of each brand he works on “like the school of method acting, where you live the part. It’s a good thing I don’t work for car companies, or else I’d own lots of cars.”

This book is written by a designer who knows how we as designers process information. These small inspirational doses offer a choice of logical paths to follow, allowing us to map out our own truth using the combinations that make sense to us. Although Millman’s own opinion is rarely hidden, she allows many other viewpoints to clearly come through in the range of voices in this inspiring book.

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enjoyed the article on the two “founders”—Donald Dohner, FIDSA and Alexander Kostellow—in the Summer 2014 issue of INNOVATION. Meticulous research turned up a lot of opinion, but may evade the truth. It seems too bad to me that the important thing about Kostellow—his lectures—have been forgotten, while those who knew one or several of the various “fathers” fuss about who was “the one.” Actually, there is rarely ever a “one” in practically any field.

I still have a file of my memories of Kostellow’s talks (some of which Carroll Gantz, FIDSA used in his well-crafted articles), and regret that no one taped him in action. However, the whole controversy wakened me to the fact that it really doesn’t matter who was the leader. The important thing is, What did they do? What inspired them?

Alexander J. Kostellow How did they inspire their students, and—most important—how did the Foundation year at Pratt and the plan for teaching develop (2D and 3D, Color, Form, Nature and Figure Sketching, various technical skills, academics, etc.)? You may have already covered that in a previous issue.

We had courses in addition to the usual group, anthropology, for example—called History of Form. It was paid for (as were other academics) by a yearly grant from GM. I suspect that GM never knew its money was being spent that way, hence the name of the course. Sadly, I could not use it for credit when I applied to Long Island University for an MA; the school thought it was a study of pots and not a rigorous explication on early man by Dr. Sula Benet.

Thank you for your beautiful magazine. It is a pleasure to look at the crisp, well-thought-out layouts and read the articles.

—Mary Wallis Gutmann

—Paul Hatch, IDSA, Director, TEAMS Design paul.hatch@teamsdesign.com

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Integrative Design

THINKING BIG

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e generally agree with the colloquial claim that designers are good at stepping back and broadly understanding their clients’ real challenges— scrutinizing context and circumstance, identifying underlying motivations, questioning basic assumptions—seeing the big picture. These important skills, however, are woefully underleveraged when it comes to design’s approach toward design education.

Toward a Pluralistic Design Education Over the last 20 years we have participated in countless discussions—formally at IDSA events, with heads of consultancies and with deeply concerned practitioners—about the betterment of design education. Rare is the suggestion for more liberal arts or humanities courses, let alone any explicit concern for the enrichment of designers as social and cultural citizens. Instead, we hear the predictable and myopic: better sketching and visualization, increased business sensibilities, more co-op experiences, deeper manufacturing and materials understanding, etc.

When school is merely industry’s training ground and a preparatory device for employment, design misses out on valuable opportunities to participate in, and contribute to, culture beyond creating mass-produced goods for the marketplace. As design practitioners and business owners ourselves, we certainly understand the profit motive and the corporate mandate of maximizing shareholder value, but this is merely one cultural component among so many. It is necessary to understand design’s important collaboration with powerful capital markets, but it is far from sufficient.

Our fundamental take on design and design education is inclusive and pluralistic, not only in how it is done, but also for what and whom it can serve. We want industrial design graduates in all facets of society—politics, religion,

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human services, international development, public policy and corporate leadership, as well as in product design, research and development. And if designers are not working within public policy, for example, we still want them to be able to work with public policy—intelligently engaging its stakeholders and being capable of adroitly incorporating such perspectives in design solutions. When education fails to sensitize and prepare young practitioners for these capacities, society loses.

Foundational to this pluralistic design worldview is the idea that we’re better together—that as responsible and mature individuals, professionals and professions we grow beyond dependence and independence and move toward interdependence. Civil society is preferable to lawless masses of individuals—far from perfect, but still preferable. With the core belief of inclusiveness, we claim design education has the responsibility to figure out how to achieve it. Enter the notion of integrative design and thinking big.

Integrative design, most broadly, is about seeing a design problem/opportunity more holistically, addressing the inherent complexity, respecting the multiple perspectives and actually integrating the often-competing stakeholder demands toward optimal—rather than ideal—solutions. It demands a scale change and collaboration, and is the primary tool in taking on wicked problems.

Integrating an Integrative Approach Indeed, we have an already-bulging four-year university curriculum; it’s nice to say you want to add more to it, but is that possible? There are two likely paths (that also could be blended to some degree): lose many of the traditional skills that an undergraduate design student is taught in lieu of others, or keep the traditional skill set but solve the deficit through graduate education. As pluralists, we believe that

Expanding Design Collaboration

there is value and vulnerability in each of these approaches (plus the middle ground), but would like to see an education landscape that adds to current industrial design offerings with: (1) traditional undergraduate programs that introduce broader awareness, with only minor sacrifice of traditional industrial design emphases; (2) new undergraduate design programs that teach an integrative approach, which necessitates greater sacrifice from traditional industrial design emphases; and (3) new graduate programs that build upon a traditional industrial design skill set. Addressing the latter, at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art and Design, we are excited about the new Master of Design in Integrative Design.

Probably few designers would inherently object to the idea of being more inclusive and pluralistic—the great challenge is in doing it. This is why integrative design really demands its own curricula. It’s difficult stuff, but is ultimately worth taking on because we feel it is the right approach. Integrative design extends design’s role and relevance and offers the possibility of better results for more stakeholders.

An integrative approach demands a somewhat different attitudinal posture: Conviction in the ideology of inclusivity—it’s too challenging to pull off without this foundation.

Confidence in industrial design’s ability to play a pivotal role in the process and to achieve successfully integrative results. Creativity in how to approach the problems and operationalize the solutions—to think differently, since the problems are intrinsically more complex. Comfort with this complexity and the chaos of the process, as well as with the inherent limitations and imperfection of the outcomes— problems are addressed rather than solved. And a true Cooperative spirit that respects differing views, values and measures of success.

In addition to the disposition necessary for integrative design, the expansiveness and inclusivity of the approach also extends to its intention, content, process, outcome and audience. Importantly, there should be an acknowledgment that designers have multiple intentions that go beyond creating an artifact for sale: commercial design seeks profit, responsible design seeks service, experimental design seeks to explore and discursive design seeks a provocative voice. Of course, the content of what design must deal with and integrate is larger as it incorporates perspectives from diverse professions, experts, institutions and societal entities. The process of integrative design reflects the complexity of the problem and is lengthier and more reductive, and demands more compromise. While the typical industrial design outcomes are physical products, here they are not predetermined and may also include objects, services, interactions, instructions, interfaces and environments. And lastly, the audience and beneficiaries of integrative design is broader; indeed a goal is greater participation and reach within society and even to constituencies that are overlooked or ignored.

An integrative design approach demands that we think bigger and that we do bigger. It’s not easy, it takes longer and the results demand greater compromise, but ultimately it’s the right thing for design and design education to tackle as we further establish our relevance amid an increasingly complex and demanding 21st century.

—Bruce M. Tharp, PhD, IDSA; Stephanie M. Tharp bmtharp@umich.edu; smtharp@umich.edu

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LEARNING FROM THE PAST

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nce upon a time, Read Viemeister, FIDSA (my dad) and his partner Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA were urged to join the prestigious Society of Industrial Designers (SID), setting off a 70-year chain of events leading up to me sharing this old story with you.

It was 1944 when Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA and his buddies, founded SID. He was the first president, along with the original 14 “good ol’ boys:” Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, Harold Van Doren, Donald Deskey, FIDSA, Norman Bel Geddes, Lurelle Guild, Egmont Arens, FIDSA, Ray Patten, Joseph Platt, John Gordon Rideout, George Sakier, Joe Sinel, Brooks Stevens, FIDSA and Russel Wright, FIDSA. The leaders of the industrial design world kept membership very exclusive; each founding member could invite only one additional designer to join the following year. The applicants were required to submit three of their own mass-produced product designs that had to be for three different industries. Read and Budd had designed cars, pens, appliances and furniture, but they thought claiming to be the sole designer was a “really dumb rule.”

It is hard for any one designer to claim credit for a whole design (except for someone like Loewy). Read and Budd were a team, designing things together. So they refused to apply separately and made the first joint application. Budd recalls that this showed Read’s strong sense of the “intercooperative nature of our profession, what we call close team work.” They were accepted into the elite circle.

But why were those 15 fathers of our profession founding a club? They weren’t like Groucho Marx, who didn’t want belong to any club that would accept him. Those famous industrial designers were all competitors. What did they gain from joining together? They made the group hard to get into to concentrate their power. I assume they thought that collectively they could amplify their voices. As an official organization, they could impartially educate the world about the new profession (which of course would lend credence to their own work). I bet they also figured they could keep an eye on each other and have a good time doing it.

Being part of the national organization was important to my dad because he could learn about new things, and

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it gave him a platform to influence his profession. Both dad and Budd were so involved that eventually they were made fellows of IDSA. They also found the camaraderie at the conventions that they normally lacked, working out in the boonies in a chicken coop in Yellow Springs, OH. When I was a lad, my dad would come home to from meetings in exotic cities with bunches of cool nameplate samples and plastics specimens. Now I come home with cool rubber things and some kind of satchel covered with logos. The conferences are benchmarks for me and for our profession. For instance, in 1985 Smart Design debuted at Wordesign, where I met Steven Holt, editor of ID magazine, and started hanging out with Deane Richardson, FIDSA (another Ohio guy who used IDSA to extend his impact globally). And in Santa Barbara, they made me a Fellow (speaking of exclusive)!

SID did become more inclusive when it changed the name to the American Society of Industrial Designers (I guess to signify that some of the members were from places beyond New York City). Read and Budd helped plan the 1958 ASID national conference in Bedford Springs, PA. Read was the head of publications (which meant he designed them). Sam Scherr, the annual meeting chair (and later president of the American Crafts Council, forerunner of MAD), wrote in the introduction: “These are days of accelerated change! [Remember, this is 1958.] It is most important that those individuals who have a major responsibility for the directions of design take the time to reflect, and question ... The designer’s impact upon individuals and nations is expanding—what are the ‘design responsibilities and directions’ that coincide with this broadening role?”

Even back in 1958 they were addressing their duty to the environment and talking about innovation. Fred Hauserman, the owner of Sunar/Hauserman, maker of prefabricated steel houses and furniture, spoke on “Management Responsibilities and Planned Obsolescence.”

Then management psychologists Dr. Richard Wallen and Dr. Irving Taylor spoke on “Creative Processes in the Design Profession,” and the conference wrapped up with a luncheon panel discussion with Mrs. Jay Doblin and Mrs. Paul McCobb: “How to be a Designer’s Wife.”

We didn’t need that kind of panel 10 years later, thanks to the lessons of women libbers burning their bras. 1968—was a year of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, student riots in Chicago and Paris, Black Panthers, all teaching us about revolution. Even the industrial design profession was changing! The 1968 IDSA national convention organizers, Read and Pierre Crease, design director of NCR, chose the theme “contradictions” for contrast: “Contradictions between our needs and our wants, contradictions between our generation and another, contradictions between our thoughts and our deeds, contradictions between we and they, contradictions between what we look at and what we see.”

The location was the perfect contradiction—the highly designed new Playboy Club Hotel at Lake Geneva, WI. The hotel was so modern, so considered, so artificial, so plastic and so not hippie groovy. Inside it was always my favorite time of day: evening, 24 hours a day. Everything was designed—black, cool, long and low, soft and sexy. It was a total corporate International Style experience: graphics, architecture, industrial design and fashion. The men’s room had a 15-foot slit window over the urinals that made the wavy Wisconsin horizon into art. I slept in the anteroom of Mom and Dad’s suite. It had a supercool fireplace: a bed of white marble chips and a single horizontal polished stainless steel pipe with one row of gas jets. Psychologist Richard Farson from the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute said in his presentation, “We’ve never had it so good!” Playboy cartoonist Arnold Roth totally agreed.

Times really were changing; designers were transforming new technology into things people wanted and things that would change our lives. It was no longer true that everyone sees the same way—drugs, media and the Schrödinger uncertainty principal were proving that! The Marshall McLuhan associate Harley Parker explained how the “TV child thinks in a manner that the literate mind interprets as unstructured.” Attendees screened the Beatles’ new movie Yellow Submarine before it was released (a different cut), and saw demonstrations of the new holography.

Jurist Leon Higginbotham (the lone African-American in the all-white group) pleaded for equal opportunities for blacks

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because “better environments and schools allow people to cope more effectively with the problems of our lives.” Daniel Ransohoff from the University of Cincinnati Community Planning Graduate School spoke about how we “neglect our visual environment for economic expediency. But we’ve raised our expectations to a point where the gratification of our needs and wants has become difficult if not impossible—improvement brings the need for more improvement in constantly accelerating demands.”

Victor Papenek, L/IDSA reacted to the contradictions in our consumer society forcefully His books—Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) followed by one co-authored with Jim Hennessey, Nomadic furniture: how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, collapses, stacks, knocks-down, inflates or can be thrown away and re-cycled (1973)—essentially sounding a wake-up call for the profession. He taught us how to DIY and inspired the maker culture 40 years ago. But he also called industrial design “the most dangerous profession.”

Although Read may have been sympathetic to his ecological ideas, he was one of the designers who was really upset

by Papenek—he didn’t like his tone and choice of words.

In 1976, IDSA rescinded Papenek’s speaking invitation at the last minute. Times had changed seven years later when IDSA finally invited him back to the conference in Seattle. In 1983, when Boeing was still bigger than Microsoft, Dad and I ate most of our meals with Victor, enjoying his wit, insights and his fancy tuxedo.

At the 1984 IDSA conference in Chicago, Budd finally confessed to me that he was my godfather. I had no idea that I had a godfather, let alone such a fantastic one. He figured that by this time it was safe to tell me—I was old enough to take care of myself if anything happened to my parents.

When they asked me to chair the 1995 national convention, my ambition was to make it as imaginative as I remembered my dad’s Contradictions conference 26 years earlier.

My content echoed his issues: the role of design and new technology, balancing wants versus needs, fostering diversity, the environment and the future. His synthetic Playboy Club venue was the opposite of my super New Age Santa Fe, NM one. I called the conference Natural Resources, suggesting we should consider both our planet and our design as natural resources. Get it? Ecology and thinking.

Lorraine Wild designed the graphics based on the Santa Fe Railroad’s logo. My cousin, Jane Viemeister, performed a piano piece she composed for the opening ceremony and the band led by my buddy Duke Dewey played at the receptions. Lisa Krohn did the wayfinding with portable signage that we moved as we moved. I used the local resources as much as possible: sessions at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and cookouts and group discussions at the Santa Clara Pueblo. We designated spots outside as “talkabouts” where we could just talk to each other(!).

One night the speakers made their presentations around a bonfire at a Native American campsite. Like Contradictions, I went outside the field for speakers. I got Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann; futurist and science-fiction author of The Cybernetic (City) State: Terminal Space becomes Phenomenal Scott Bukatman; anthropologist and author of The Fourth Dimension in Architecture: The Impact of Building on Behavior Edward T. Hall; and cross-cultural theorists Joe Boxer’s Chief Underpants Officer Nick Graham, Maya Lin and MoMA’s Paola Antonelli. And I threw in some low riders for excitement. Reiterating Papenek, Gordon Lippencott’s contribution on video exclaimed, “We have reached a critical point where professionals in marketing have greater power to persuade than consumers have to resist.”

One of my innovations was to use the time traveling on the bus for presentations; speakers rode in the front like tour guides. I got John Emery to speak on the ride to Los Alamos. He brought along an ancient Native American clay pot from the Acoma Pueblo and passed it around the bus.

Then he passed around a Tupperware storage bowl and asked, “What’s the difference? Which one do you want?”

Morrison Cousins, IDSA, head designer at Tupperware, who just happened to be sitting in the front seat, asked back, “Which one are you going to store your leftovers in?”

John went on to say that “the good stuff, like the pot has soul. Who would want a Winnebago?” Morrison said, “Well, nobody designs Winnebagos!”

The moral of the story is that we can continue to pose tough questions and debate design issues 70 years later thanks to those 15 famous designers who founded SID in 1944. Thanks to all the fathers and mothers since, we are continuing to learn while we hang out with a bunch of cool designers. Let the party continue—especially now that we finally taught the general public what industrial design is!

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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FROM INTEREST

TO IMPACT Announces the launch of the

IMPACT DESIGN HUB impactdesignhub.org

The go-to resource on design for a better world Learn more at ImpactDesignHub.org Butaro Hospital in Rwanda by MASS Design Group. Photo by Iwan Baan.

A L O O K B ACK

THE URGE TO MERGE

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n March 5, 2015, IDSA will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding on that date in 1965.

But this auspicious event did not arise out of thin air. Indeed, the industrial design air was rather thick with competing organizations. A merger had been in the making for seven years as three separate industrial design organizations realized that they could be more effective if they combined their resources and efforts to promote and grow the profession internationally.

The three organizations had evolved separately over time and under differing circumstances. The Industrial Designers Institute (IDI) had been founded in 1938 as the American Designer’s Institute (ADI) by a number of furniture designers in Chicago led by John Vassos, FIDSA, head of design at the Radio Corporation of America. The American Society of Industrial Designers (ASID) had been founded in 1944 as the Society of Industrial Designers (SID) by 15 of the leading names in industrial design, led by the big three—Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA—and 12 others: Harold Van Doren, Egmont Arens, FIDSA, Donald Deskey, FIDSA, Norman Bel Geddes, Lurelle Guild, Ray Patten, Joseph B. Platt, John Gordon Rideout, George Sakier, Joseph Sinel, Brooks Stevens, FIDSA and Russel Wright, FIDSA. By 1965, many of those and 20 dozen or so other pioneer founders of industrial design had retired or passed away.

The rest were scattered between these two organizations.

Thirty industrial design educators, headed by Joseph Carriero, had just recently founded the third organization, the Industrial Design Education Association (IDEA) in 1957.

There were fundamental differences between these organizations. To qualify for membership, IDI accepted as evidence of professional practice products manufactured by a single company, but SID, and later ASID, insisted on at least three products made by companies in different industries. IDI had a fixed annual fee of $40, but ASID dues ranged from $50 to $540, a sliding scale tied to the size of the office or corporation one worked for. IDEA was formed in part because neither IDI or ASID considered educators professional practitioners and accordingly accepted only educators who were also practicing professionals. SID had complained that the American Designer’s Institute did not

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include the magic words “industrial design” in its title, so in 1951, it changed its name to the Industrial Designers Institute and absorbed another Chicago design organization, the Chicago Society of Industrial Designers, founded

by Dave Chapman and others in 1938. As more international industrial design organizations were formed, and the Society of Industrial Designers began exhibiting abroad, in 1955 it also changed its name to include “American” in its title. Also in 1955, IDI relocated to New York City, the perceived center of industrial design at the time.

By 1955, IDI and ASID were collaborating in the assembly, display, transportation and implementation of both national and international industrial design exhibitions to promote the profession and their own work. In 1958, IDI president Robert Redman, FIDSA and ASID president William Goldsmith, FIDSA established independent exploratory committees to explore the possibility of a merger.

IDI, the largest of the organizations, seemed to initiate the idea. According to Arthur Pulos in The American Design Adventure, 1940–1975, in 1959, Redman and IDI Chairman George Beck, FIDSA proposed to ASID President Donald McFarland, FIDSA a resolution: “The officers of IDI believe that the profession should be represented by one national organization and are confident that a vast majority of members are of the same belief.”

There were, however, six more years of meetings and collaboration toward this end while challenging differences were resolved. The group adopted ASID’s membership requirement that at least three products from different industries were needed to demonstrate professional practice as evidence that industrial design was a generalist rather than a specialized profession. Annual dues were compromised at about $50. Fellow members of both IDI and ASID were to automatically become fellows in the new organization, which was to be called the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA).

As a preliminary step, the two societies agreed to demonstrate their common purpose by holding a joint annual meeting in Philadelphia, on October 16–19, 1964, chaired by both Richard Hollerith, FIDSA of ASID and Tucker Madawick, FIDSA of IDI. The occasion was used to present the annual IDI national design awards that had

(the last president of ASID) and Tucker Madawick (the last president of IDI) as vice presidents; George Payne, FIDSA as treasurer; and Beck as secretary. IDSA settled into new headquarters on West 55th Street in New York. At the time, IDSA had a total membership of about 650: approximately 50 from IDEA, 200 from ASID and 400 from IDI. IDSA had a successful first year without a hitch. Well, there was one. IDSA had agreed in the merger negotiations to continue the annual national design awards originated by IDI in 1951. At the first IDSA annual meeting in the fall of 1965, it did so under the banner of IDSA, but that was the last time. The problem was that the awards program required that all the individual designers of a product needed to be credited for the design. This was in direct conflict with the traditional practice of famous designers who, as a matter of policy, insisted on crediting only themselves, no matter who did the actual design. Their rationale was that clients specifically hired industrial design firms because of the reputation of their famous founder, and demanded that the design of their product be credited to that individual. One of these famous designers was Dreyfuss, who was adamant about the issue and was now president of IDSA. So after the 1965 national IDI design awards, IDSA sponsored no more for the next 15 years. In 1980, after Dreyfuss and Teague had passed away, and Loewy at age 87 had no problem with the practice of full credits for designs, IDSA resumed the annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) program, now known as the International Design Excellence Awards, which continues to this day providing recognition and promotion of hundreds of domestic and international industrial designers.

IDSA has fulfilled its original promise of representing the US profession as a single voice to the world. More than that, it has grown to well over 3,000 members with a fine professional staff of 15; 30 local chapters in five geographical districts, each with an annual conference; an award-winning professional journal; and an international design awards program at its annual conference. So as IDSA celebrates its 50th birthday on March 5, may I wish it many happy returns and a long, successful life into the future.

5

been granted since 1951 and to continue the ASID series of annual meetings on special subjects. The major guest speaker, Misha Black of England, explored the dichotomy between art/design and science. His conclusion was that the task of the designer was to sift research and analysis for those facts that could be used as the basis for a creative design decision. Black suggested, according to Pulos, that the importance of designers was dependent upon their ability to spring forward to new solutions, to create new forms and a new unity in order to produce something that had never existed before.

That was the first national design meeting I ever attended; I was receiving my first national IDI design award for a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I was a young 34-year-old guest of Robert Hose, FIDSA, Hoover’s design consultant at the time and a past president of the Society of Industrial Designers, who had encouraged me to apply for membership and join ASID in 1962. At the time, I was a senior designer at The Hoover Company, and in order to apply for membership I was required to submit three products I had designed from different industries that had reached final production. I submitted a vacuum cleaner, a floor polisher and a chemical bottle, all made by Hoover, which ASID accepted as if made by different industries. I also had to submit three letters of recommendation from existing members of ASID and a formal portfolio of my work. In 1967, five years later, I would begin my long leadership career in IDSA as secretarytreasurer of the Ohio Valley Chapter.

After their joint annual meeting in October 1964, Hose of ASID and Joseph Parriott, FIDSA of IDI concluded the merger, which was followed immediately by the absorption of IDEA to create a single voice for industrial design in the United States. Board members of IDI and ASID met in New York on January 25, 1965, to sign the legal documents required to formally establish IDSA, and on March 5 IDSA was incorporated by the state of New York. The new board of directors, which was drawn from the two parent organizations, included Dreyfuss as president; Vassos as chairman of the board; Hose, Parriott, Donald Dailey, FIDSA

—Carroll Gantz, FIDSA carrgantz@bellsouth.net

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Aligning

Design Education with

Design Practice How we define design is evolving. Designers today need to understand how to work collectively and in collaboration with a broader community of professionals and stakeholders to achieve common goals. The model of the lone designer as hero should be consigned to the wastebasket of history.

John Marshall PhD, Director MDes in Integrative Design

The new MDes in Integrative Design → Collaborative → Problem-based → Cross-disciplinary → For professionals seeking to pivot in their career → Generous funding available

For more info about the Stamps MDes go to: stamps.umich.edu/mdes

stamps.umich.edu

By Lorraine Justice, FIDSA, Guest Editor lorrainejustice@gmail.com

D E S I G N E DUCATI O N

Lorraine Justice, PhD is currently the dean of the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Prior to joining RIT, she was the director of the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, taking it into the top 30 design schools in the world. She is the author of China’s Design Revolution (MIT Press, 2012). She has presented at TEDu and TEDx and consults for some of the top firms in the country.

THE EXPANDING ROLE OF DESIGN EDUCATION I

n this issue, Mark Dziersk, FIDSA points to three basic needs for a quality design education: faculty and their passion for teaching, a teaching space that is conducive to learning, and a curriculum that is flexible enough to allow students room for risk taking. I am sure many of us will agree with his criteria. We also know that the content in the design classroom today is more complex than even five years ago. Augmented online classes, 3D printers, flipped classrooms, new software, more cross-disciplinary subjects, expanding professional practice work options for students, and more have our design professors and students trying many new avenues to see what works best with the basics. For certain, design education is going through yet another phase that will strengthen and expand the reach of design content; business, computing, engineering and sociology programs have heightened their interest in design and have begun to adopt some aspects of design education that are relevant to their discipline.

Also in this issue, a few of our passionate faculty in the US share their latest insights that have come from years of teaching design content. Jim Budd, IDSA, chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial Design, has taught in the area of design and technology for many years, engaging his students, and now faculty, in his program. Embedded sensors, 3D printing and psychology are brought together to make life-changing products. Eric Anderson, FIDSA, associate professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, shares his wisdom on teaching cross-disciplinary classes. He stresses the need to educate potential employers about the distinct value of designers so that companies won’t try to fit them into rigid organizational structures. Katherine Bennett, IDSA, associate professor at Art Center, and Liz Sanders, an associate professor at The Ohio State University, have spent years finding the best ways to deliver design research content in the classroom. (Hint: It involves more than just a few lectures.) Warren Ginn, FIDSA, assistant professor at North Carolina State University, finds that making materials and processes enjoyable is one of the best ways to teach this content. He also warns that designers must remain engaged in materials and processes choices throughout the entire process or “someone else will end up doing it.”

These short articles are from just a very few of our passion-

ate professors teaching in the US who are creating the new generation of graduate and undergraduate designers. While we could not include everyone, we hope to hear from more design educators in the coming issues of INNOVATION. The designers and design educators of today stand on the shoulders of those who came before us—those dedicated, passionate, informed design faculty who urged us onward into our first jobs and maybe later through the morass of university tenure systems or competitive private art school teaching positions. Many design educators are also practitioners as well, consulting or working with local and international companies to provide their particular areas of expertise, keep their skills current or create relationships to support design co-ops. Other faculty members engage in design research grants related to the automotive, business, computing, engineering, medical and other fields, giving them an interdisciplinary edge in the classroom.

Let’s not forget our corporate partners, such as Autodesk, GE, Microsoft, Steelcase and more, who have supported design education and research for many, many years. These corporate friends have played a tremendous role in helping design students make the transition from design education to design practice.

So where are our design students going? Everywhere.

There are still great corporate design jobs available, even in an economic downturn. Every year a new crop of design students want to market their own product or grow a new company. Some choose to freelance or feel lucky enough to work with one of their “dream” design firms. And some feel the call to get a higher degree so they can eventually teach design and support “the cause.”

In a Core77 interview, Craig Vogel, FIDSA, associate dean of the University of Cincinnati, said, “The role of design continues to expand horizontally and vertically as design processes and ways of thinking are seen as valid for strategic planning as well as product implementation.” As the role of design continues to expand, we need to fill and refresh the number of design educators in our public and private universities so we don’t lose precious ground for our discipline. If you feel the call to teach, pick up your phone and call the closest design program. Teaching just may be the best years of your design life. n

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DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

F

or this special issue of INNOVATION on education, I wanted to think about designing the future of education and bring together different perspectives from people for whom this is their passion and expertise. Here are their diverse yet complementary views on design education. They interweave

the notions of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, design as the liberal arts of the future, design for the common good, and design as a multilingual discipline and a way to turn people into continuous learners.

Sooshin Choi, IDSA is the provost, VP for academic affairs and professor of design at the College for Creative Studies.

I took over the VP of education role for IDSA from him and we co-hosted the 2014 IDSA Design Symposium in Austin: Design is done by designers as well as non-designers (this includes other professionals in product development, marketers, critics, factory workers, users, consumers, journals, basically everyone other than designers). Obviously designers make a direct impact, while non-designers make indirect influences. Designers think, communicate and make designs. Non-designers involved in product development think and communicate. Users of design appreciate— or depreciate—the designs. By thinking, communicating and appreciating design, non-designers are making huge contributions. Today’s design education has become more inclusive and less exclusive. In other words, more nondesigners are talking about design while fewer designers are specialized in design. I think the future of design education should be inclusive (for all) and exclusive (for designers).

Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA is an industrial design innovator and professor of design at Parsons School of Design. He was a part of our education panel in Austin and foreshadowed the ideas he is sharing here: Since antiquity liberal arts formed the foundation for the education of a well-rounded person. Today, well-rounded people don’t just debate and judge, they actually have to

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make the world better. The exploration of ideas needs a touchstone in reality. As design thinking became a driver of innovation in Wall Street’s eyes, it’s apparent that a new kind of liberal arts with a big dose of the traditional industrial design curriculum is the ticket to real progress (not more MBAs). John Dewey’s progressive education pedagogy was about learning by doing. Our industrial design curriculum is built on learning by making. Liberal arts needs physical manifestations as much as design needs an intellectual foundation—the combination is what makes real sense. Today to combat the migration to virtual reality, the well-rounded person needs to know how to think and how to make physical stuff: integrating smart ideas and beautiful objects. Isn’t that what makes good design?

Rama Chorpash is the director of product design at Parsons The New School for Design and associate professor. He has developed the new MFA in industrial design at Parsons that was just launched: Living in a networked world means learners acquire skills at their own pace and in their own locale. While autodidactic virtual learning is vital to building tomorrow’s skill sets, it is only through open discourse that we might direct design toward common good. The next generation of industrial designers navigates seemingly contradictory dichotomies: manufacturing and sustainability, consumerism and need, globalization and localization, offshoring and

on-shoring. With an eye toward reconciling these tensions into a more integrated future, faculty must intensify their capacity to nurture direct human interaction, challenging students to conceive and create meaningful future-facing narratives and work.

Allan Chochinov is the co-founder and chair of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Products of Design and editor-at-large of Core77. I teach my class on Deconstruction:Reconstruction in his program: A next kind of design education empowers designers to negotiate many challenges: reconciling the gratifications of craft with the imperatives of scale; designers love making things, but manufacturing those things at scale has awesome (and often unintended) consequences with which we’ve barely begun to reckon. Looking at design as a multilingual discipline: making, doing and thinking about stewardship at the same time as brand; supply chain along with social media strategy; labor practices alongside business modeling. And ultimately acknowledging that the products of design can, and must, evidence design intent along a continuum—from shared sets of instructions to social interventions to speculative futures—with a generous spirit and a sober optimism.

Fabienne Munch is the chair of the Design School at the University of Montreal. She led innovation programs at Herman Miller for more than a decade before taking on her new role in Montreal: Designers take risks that only few of their business clients would. Risk takers turn their head away from the usual and familiar to favor an alternative expression of their thoughts and feelings, which leads, often, to better ways of resolving dysfunctional situations all the way up to worldwide-level problems. The future of education must include eye-openers, disciplines meant to raise awareness of bad habits and perfectible behaviors, all leading toward better products and services, improved social systems, and a smarter balance between the creation of wealth and its distribution. Design education programs actually contain most of the required ingredients to do so. Extra emphasis on apprenticeship, then practice of skills and behaviors, such as courage, ethics and generosity, and last but not least, persuasiveness, will complete the key tenets of the future of education.

Sveinung Skaalnes is the global director of partnerships at Hyper Island and program director at 30 Weeks. He and I chatted about the future of education on location at 30 Weeks, Google’s experimental design school: Education of the future is personalized and tailored.

Today the most forward-thinking companies are taking responsibility for developing the workforce’s collective capabilities through creating internal academies and programs to secure professional development for their employees.

And it’s not just about skills, knowledge and tools, but confidence and competence. These organizations want their people to become continuous learners who cannot just handle change, but are able to adapt and lead. They see that in a culture where change is the only constant, a shared ownership and individual accountability in the workforce are key to a thriving company culture. Just as with communication and everything else around us, learning is no longer linear. The role of education is no longer to provide right or wrong answers to predetermined questions, but rather to prepare people for life-long learning—to become effective, adaptable, confident human beings who feel highly empowered with a deep sense of self-worth.

These exceptional education leaders share values of creativity, ethics and open-mindedness, and the responsibility for shaping and influencing thousands of students in an evertransforming field of design. As for me, my own experience is gathered from teaching design students—but maybe even more so from teaching non-designers how to design their lives using design tools and process. Through the Design the Life You Love workshops, I have learned that we are all capable of being incredibly creative, that design education is for everyone and that it benefits everyone—with problem-solving, turning constraints into opportunities, and learning to work collaboratively and think holistically and with optimism. Not everyone needs to be a designer, but everyone needs design as a basic skill—just like we don’t need to be mathematicians, but we do need to learn math.

And design is more fun!

I look forward to continuing this conversation together with all of you as we build to the IDSA Education Symposium on Designing the Future of Education on August 18, 2015, the first day of the IDSA International Conference on the Future of the Future in Seattle. n —Ayse Birsel, IDSA VP of Education; faculty member, School of Visual Arts; and co-founder, Birsel + Seck.

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Cross-Training Integrated Innovators as a New Educational Model

BEYOND COLLABORATION

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f collaboration is the act of working together to create something of value, then why is it that many companies who have smart and talented employees find it difficult to respond to market opportunities with innovative products and service solutions? One reason may be because translating and implementing

collaborative strategies and tools across well-established (or shall we say entrenched) discipline cultures within a company is an enormous challenge. Efforts to address this challenge have birthed an industry of experts working on general and tailored offerings to assist companies who are still striving to achieve collaboration.

Don’t get me wrong. Collaboration is a worthy goal, but when it comes to focusing on the fuzzy front end of design, it has its limitations.

At the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, we are identifying greater opportunities to achieve innovation through integrated interdisciplinary teams. For well over a decade, Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Integrated Innovation for Products and Services (MII-PS), formerly the Master of Product Development, has brought designers, engineers and business students together and cross-trained them in innovation methods focused on the fuzzy front end of product development. This is achieved by leveraging the expertise of our equal partnership between the College of Fine Arts (directly with the School of Design), the College of Engineering and the Tepper Business School.

This program, a one-year professional degree, also recently inspired the creation of the Integrated Innovation Institute, which is now its home. The Integrated Innovation Institute is composed of master’s programs in Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, and one in Brooklyn currently under development.

It also supports executive education and applied research under the umbrella of integrated innovation.

Our insights are a result of working with and studying industry and from university research initiatives on innovation and entrepreneurship. We have found that many in industry approach interdisciplinary collaboration as a means of working alongside other disciplines to enhance outcomes. However, industry leaders, such as P&G and

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Nissan among others we have worked with, move beyond this notion of collaborative teams and into integrated teams.

An integrated team is where members have cross-disciplinary knowledge that is accumulated over time through work training experiences, executive education or continued education such as graduate school.

Addressing the Unclear Path to High-Functioning Integrated Teams Successful integrated teams are the benefit of an organization that has an integrative mindset and support structure.

Finding yourself in an integrated culture outside of some design practices is currently the exception rather than the rule. As more organizations pursue integrated teams as their goal, the path for designers and others who desire to be a member of a high-functioning integrated and innovative team isn’t necessarily clear. Chance work experiences cannot be relied on to provide the knowledge and learning opportunities needed to achieve this goal. In fact, such occasions may not exist unless you have the foresight to strategically move within a company or across companies, which can take years to accomplish. This was our motivation for creating and since evolving the MII-PS program.

The decision to create an integrated education model and differentiate it from collaborative models was in response

By Eric Anderson, FIDSA ea@andrew.cmu.edu

Eric Anderson is co-founder and co-director of the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, a unique entity that cross-trains students in design, engineering and business to speed the pace of innovation. He is also associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and associate professor of industrial design in the School of Design. Anderson is a Chair Emeritus of the IDSA Board of Directors.

to changing product development dynamics and near- and long-term hiring needs of industry. We saw an opportunity to prepare graduates who can contribute to organizations with established interdisciplinary cultures or within organizations that see the value of integrated interdisciplinary teams and desire to evolve their culture. Already an increasing number of companies are finding great value in graduates who can function in high-performing interdisciplinary teams and who have the skills to contribute to, if not lead, problem identification and understanding, conceptualization and problem-solving, and realization activities. These skills, which command greater knowledge across discipline domains, are becoming essential for generating insights for innovative outcomes based on shared investigation, debate, negotiation and creativity.

Our Key Considerations in Creating an Integrated Program Establish an integrated culture. Open flexible spaces are a necessary and more obvious environmental response to supporting a learning culture. However, long before we had desirable spaces, we found it important to establish an integrated philosophy and support structure (the mindset and behavior) that was demonstrated by directors, faculty and staff through shared leadership and program work, communications, presentations and engagement with students, the greater university and the public. Still, for us to establish our culture, it took time to educate stakeholders, including partners, and time to secure resource commitments. And much like any partnership, active work by all is required to set the right conditions for each class and its teams to embrace and share knowledge and accumulate experiences that result in desired learning goals and project outcomes.

Student team activity is also core to our program culture and the curriculum experience. Each project provides an opportunity for new team compositions where each of the three disciplines are represented in balance whenever possible. For example, two designers, two engineers and two business students comprise a typical team.

Create elite innovators through cross-training.

Cross-training disciplines in the fundamentals of the partnering disciplines (design, engineering and business) helps to address the inherent gap in perception between the disciplines. For example, design students are required to take fundamental engineering and business courses, depending on their professional background. Together with training in innovation strategies and methodologies, the goal for stu-

dents and teams is to see greater value in their roles, shape a broader perspective about the challenges and opportunities of any given problem, and become elite in their thinking and actions. This is demonstrated through their holistic thinking, questioning and generation of insights that more quickly lead to innovative proposals.

Manage program expectations. In a nine-month (one academic year) professional master’s degree model, matching students with the program is of high importance. Talent and intellect are sought in one of the core disciplines, although students with interesting tangential backgrounds have been accepted and successful, but they are the exception.

Students with prior work experiences who desired to shift careers after graduation have been successful in their efforts. However, those with limited or narrow prior experiences will face a higher degree of challenge. For example, an engineer with no prior design experience is highly unlikely to become a designer by the conclusion of the program.

Educate industry about elite innovators. Graduates who are prepared to make immediate contributions to companies as integrated innovators have some challenges to overcome depending on what industry they want to work in. In some cases this education is out front of traditional organization models and requires potential employers to be educated about the distinct value of our graduates or help them consider how to fit them within rigid organizational cultures. Also students—typically those without design backgrounds—need to be taught how to create new narratives about their educational and professional experiences and the value they bring. Together these approaches are helping some organizations transition to integrated teams.

Bridging the Gaps At a time when leading companies are creating integrated discipline cultures in response to design challenges that are now routinely complex and larger scale, the MII-PS program at Carnegie Mellon has been working in parallel to develop a new curricula model reflective of this need and practice.

Our goals are to create elite innovators through crosstraining students in the fundamental knowledge of our partnering disciplines (design, engineering and business), to teach innovation and entrepreneurial methods, and to demonstrate the value of an integrated culture. We see these as necessary to bridge knowledge and cultural gaps in education and for preparing graduates to add immediate value to industry through participating in, if not leading, high-functioning innovation teams. n

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By Jim Budd, IDSA, Kevin Shankwiler, IDSA and James Hallam Jim Budd is a professor and chair of the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on the exploration, design development and application of sensor-based technologies for everyday products. n Kevin Shankwiler is an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech. He has broad experience in product design with specific focus on digital design processes and manufacturing. n James Hallam is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the Interactive Product Design Lab at Georgia Tech.

His research is focused on the link between mass customization, wearable technology and therapeutic devices.

Digital Design Technologies

EXPLORING THE NEXT WAVE

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he role of design in today’s world is dramatically shifting as social, cultural and experiential factors begin to play a more dominant role in the complexities of day-to-day life. Over the past 10 years, digital technologies have radically reshaped the way people live, work and play. The first changes

began when designers started using more powerful digital tools, including 3D modeling, to support traditional drawing methods. The second wave of digital technologies, including rapid prototyping, laser cutting and integration of CNC tools, provided additional support for prototyping and manufacturing. More recent developments in wireless communication combined with the growing prevalence of sensor-based technologies now provide opportunities for designers to play a more central role in integrating technology into everyday life in a more seamless and meaningful way.

To respond to these new challenges, the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech redeveloped the curriculum for both the Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design and Master of Industrial Design to acknowledge and leverage the technical strengths across the campus in engineering, healthcare and computing. Among the changes is the Product Development & Innovation stream, which builds on a traditional industrial design focus on manufactured products and leverages ties across campus to mechanical engineering. The Interactive Product Design stream builds new ties with interactive computing, digital media and psychology and has led to the establishment of a new industrial design stream for the four-school human-computer interaction master’s program.

Parametric Design for Advanced Manufacturing In the Product Development & Innovation section of the junior industrial design studio, digital technologies are leveraged to facilitate the learning of iterative design processes. The studio engages with a variety of digital tools to conduct research, develop and evaluate designs, support design decision making, and fabricate prototypes, comStudents Luke Mastrangelo, Eric Leal, IDSA and Eddie Licitra with a completed bicycle prototype.

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Kevin Shankwiler

ponents and presentation models. Learning objectives include using digital tools to enable design evolution by engaging CAD early in the process, enabling rapid iteration through the use of digital fabrication technologies, and learning fabrication and material constraints and understanding their impact on design decisions firsthand.

The core project of the semester is a nine-week bicycle design challenge. The students, in teams of three, are tasked with designing bicycles to facilitate commuting. The project begins with research to identify relevant industry and lifestyle trends, discover commuter needs and work with actual riders to identify design insights. After compilation of their research and initial conceptualization, the students move into parametric CAD (SolidWorks) to begin to flesh out their concepts. Form data (surfaces and solids) is built onto wireframe representations of bicycle frame geometry. At this point, basic parametric relationships are created to enable students to later modify dimensional aspects of the bicycles as their designs and the human factors considerations are resolved. CAD models are used to produce physical scale models of multiple concept variations with a laser cutter or 3D printer for design evaluation and focus.

Concepts are then narrowed and refined; the parametric CAD models evolve as design details are resolved. This enables the design teams to tweak and modify their digital models as the process evolves, therefore maintaining design intent, rather than deleting and rebuilding. Digital assemblies are created to integrate off-the-shelf drivetrain components and check for proper fit, eliminate part interferences and initialize assembly plans. These refined CAD models are then used to generate higher-fidelity fractional and component models and full-scale bucks to evaluate scale, human factors and aesthetics.

In the final project phase, the student teams produce full-size appearance models, demonstrating visual form characteristics, specific design innovations, human-machine relationships and the integration of purchased components.

A CAD model over a parametric layout of a frame geometry.

The appearance models are produced using CNC machining and 3D printing. In order to produce these models, the students learn strategies to prepare and program their models for digital fabrication and assembly. The models are sectioned and sliced to fit within machine and material constraints and then imported into CAM for tool path programming and print volume arrangement.

Beyond this specific studio, the skills the students gain in parametric design and digital fabrication methods position them to engage the broader strategy of mass customization. Parametric design skills enable the students to develop for internal customization, that is, variation among design concepts and evolution of design form during project development, and for external customization in which intelligent digital models are produced post-process for the purpose of allowing external customers the ability to tailor a product to their specifications. The mass customization paradigm involves fundamentally rethinking how products are delivered to end users, and therefore provides rich content for students to explore.

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Sensor-Based Wearable Technologies New technologies are all too often used to redesign existing products and systems without investigating opportunities to fully leverage the efficiencies of new capabilities. The Interactive Product Design stream explores the potential application of sensor-based technologies combined with wireless communication capabilities to develop new product concepts to enhance the user experience while providing more ecologically sensitive solutions in a broad crosssection of real-life situations. Projects include design for mobility, design of wearable technologies, design for health and well-being, and design of interactive systems to support a more sustainable future. A key objective for students is to master the basics of sensor technologies, electronics and programming required to produce working prototypes to fully demonstrate product concepts.

The most recent developments in sensors and wireless communications have begun to foster innovations in wearable technologies that provide feedback on personal

Initial prototypes of the Haptic Mirror Therapy Glove

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performance in sports activities via biometric sensors and/ or an enhanced level of interaction with the environment via location-based information services. The design requirements for these wearables are among the most demanding mobile applications. Few historic precedents exist, and the challenges are daunting to fully integrate operational electronics into a comfortable, fashionable garment that will perform with the reliability we have come to expect from digital technologies.

Industrial design methods are well-suited to the intricacies of design development for wearable technologies that involve new materials, new technology and new methods that bridge the physical and the digital in a mobile and wearable platform that is both functional and aesthetic.

Materials must be flexible, compliant, weather resistant, washable, durable and fashionable. The electronics must be reliable, compact, lightweight, flexible, readily accessible and easy to operate. All the parts must work together, and the garment must be designed for manufacture.

Meeting the production requirements for wearables necessitates new applications of rapid prototyping technologies. Building on precedent techniques, we have been refining the production of laser-etched circuits in conductive fabrics that are capable of supporting our desired circuit density and producing easily modifiable patterns that can adapt to changing design requirements. This approach allows us to create the circuit configuration to support any combination of components in a well-designed garment to accommodate fit, function and aesthetics.

The following two examples provide insight into some of the more complex wearable projects that necessitate the integration of a full range of design skills, leveraging the methodologies outlined above.

The Haptic Mirror Therapy Glove research project (by James Hallam) produced a set of interactive gloves designed to accelerate stroke rehabilitation. The initial proof of concept was used to demonstrate the viability of the interaction and the effectiveness of the hardware platform. It also demonstrated the need to improve the sensitivity of the components, their ease of positioning and the comfort and durability of the glove.

Because there were no commercial force sensors suited for applications in wearable technologies, it became necessary to design a sensor better suited for use in gloves, one built using a more comfortable fabric based on a design that matches the strike zone of a fingertip under pressure and one that allows for the widest possible sweet spot that would reduce the number of erroneously ignored inputs. We used a fingerprint scan to provide a template to laser cut components and fabricate our own sensors. These new sensors were tested and found to be highly responsive and stable in position, capable of capturing repeated finger taps and sensing rapid changes in pressure in excess of eight times a second. They are also comfortable and very easy to sew into the glove prototypes.

Highlighted fingertips scan of the Haptic glove, and the orientation and layout of the initial fingertip FSR (force sensing resistors) design.

The current version of the glove is now fully functional and usable and demonstrates the intent of the project. The next stage is to begin to assess and develop the rehabilitative potential of the glove in concert with physiotherapists and patients. This will necessitate the further development of processes capable of producing fitted gloves for a wide variety of hand sizes.

A second project, Ballet Hero (by James Hallam, Emily Keen, Alison McKenna, Christa Lee and Mudit Gupta), involved the design of a garment for ballet instruction. The garment is dominated by a high-contrast stripe running up the legs, torso and arms. Each stripe is lit from underneath with a set of individually addressable RGB LEDs that can be controlled independently. Each limb is controlled by its own microprocessor paired with an accelerometer, which senses changes in movement and uses this data to trigger LEDs to indicate location and trajectory.

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The four microcontrollers on the garment, each of which is connected to the central microprocessor placed on the back, are capable of reading and sending data from each of the limbs using the I2C protocol. The central controller receives wireless control signals and sends error messages to the individual microcontrollers, which flash patterns visible to the user. All of the technical components across the garment are connected by a network sewn out of conductive thread with the ability to modify and upgrade the garment as the requirements of the garment are refined in the development process. The flexible integrated sensor network in the final design allows the garment to conform well to the instructor’s movements while at the same time providing real-time feedback for the dance student.

Both our work with parametric modeling and our work with wearable technologies are focused on exploratory applications. We continually discover that there is much to learn from each successive project. As our experience grows with the new tools, new materials and new technology, we continue to find opportunities to improve design efficiency, increase utility and enhance aesthetics in our efforts to foster a better user experience for the next generation of high-tech products. n

Detail of the Ballet Hero: Interactive Garment for Ballet Instruction showing the indicator lights arranged along the arm of the garment.

The central microcontroller of Ballet Hero provides power and I2C data connections to each of the four limbs.

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Interdisciplinarity in Design Education

BENEFITS & CHALLENGES

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variety of social, technological and economic factors have been rapidly changing our world and reshaping the processes of new product development. Contemporary professional design practice is highly collaborative, occurring across continents and requiring advanced knowledge of

multiple disciplines. If we are to train students to be successful in the industrial design profession, we need to give them the tools that will enable them to respond to these shifting perspectives. Design education needs to prepare designers to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams in order to tackle the challenges they will face in the future. In addition to providing them the knowledge and skills needed to be effective designers, we also need to train them to work in cross-functional teams.

Editor’s note: This article was selected as the Best Education Paper Award at the 2014 IDSA Education Symposium and has been adapted from its original format.

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By Lauren McDermott, IDSA, Prasad Boradkar and Renu Zunjarwad lauren.mcdermott@asu.edu n prasad.boradkar@asu.edu n renu.zunjarwad@asu.edu The co-authors are from Arizona State University. Lauren McDermott is an associate professor in industrial design and assistant director of the Design School, Prasad Boradkar is an associate professor in industrial design and director of InnovationSpace, and Renu Zunjarwad is a PhD candidate in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. McDermott’s research interests include design education, human factors and educational environments; Boradkar examines objects from the perspectives of design studies and material culture; and Zunjarwad conducts visual ethnographic studies of cultural practices of ethnic groups.

The Fundamentals of Interdisciplinarity Cross-functional collaboration is often described as multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and each one of these forms represents a different type of engagement as well as level of integration between disciplines. As renowned scholar on interdisciplinarity Julie Klein explains in her book Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity “constitute a core vocabulary for understanding both the genus of interdisciplinarity and individual species within the general classification.”

Multidisciplinarity merely signifies the coming together of several disciplines to tackle a specific problem; transdisciplinarity refers to a deeper integration between disciplines.

For instance, a multidisciplinary research project may be divided into smaller segments and distributed to various members of a team to tackle on their own, and at the end the results are combined into a comprehensive solution or report. In transdisciplinary projects the problem is too complex to be apportioned and the disciplinary experts have to work together. In these situations, the integration between disciplines is intense, and the output of one discipline

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actively shapes and changes the output of another. Finally, interdisciplinarity serves as an umbrella term for transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. Of these three, transdisciplinarity shows the most promise for leading to truly innovative, integrated and transformative solutions to complex problems.

In his essay titled “Towards Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Education and Innovation,” Erich Jantsch defines these terms similarly by outlining the nature of relationships between the participating disciplines.

Multidisciplinarity is the lack of real cooperation between the disciplines. The problem at hand tends to be subdivided and different disciplines apply their expertise to it. He points out that “there is no understanding built amongst disciplines and disciplinary methods are never questioned. So, there may be a short term solution, but we do not learn anything from the experience.” Jantsch defines transdisciplinarity as “the coordination of all disciplines and interdisciplines in the education/innovation system on the basis of generalized axiomatics (introduced from the purposive level down) and an emerging epistemological pattern.” In other words, this form of collaboration has the potential of generating new knowledge.

able energy systems and desertification. This week-long charrette challenges multidisciplinary teams of third-year undergraduate students from all design disciplines in the school (architecture, industrial design, interior design, landscape architecture and visual communication design) to imagine solutions or opportunities around a particular topic.

Proposals resulting from the charrette may include designs for communities, infrastructures, products and systems, and other economies or mechanisms for the built environment.

Roughly 40 teams of approximately seven students each are formed beforehand. Though one faculty member is assigned to each team, they are encouraged to consult with other faculty and students during the week. Faculty members provide energy, focus and management, and often play the role of encouraging cooperation and helping resolve conflicts.

Proposals are presented in both poster and video form, and juries evaluate them based on the following: a clear definition and communication of the proposal, reasonable feasibility of the proposal, originality (including new combinations of existing systems and ideas), visual quality and craft of the proposal, and demonstration of integrated disciplinary collaboration.

The following pages offer some examples of interdisciplinary collaborations conducted in the Design School at Arizona State University. In each case, there is a unique makeup of teams, the length of the collaboration varies, and the nature of the projects undertaken is different.

As part of the undergraduate design curricula, students are often required to take two or more semesters of core studio-based courses with students from several art and design majors in which they learn general design principles and processes. At Arizona State University, design majors undergo four semesters of discipline-specific design studios as well as support courses that provide a firm grounding in discipline-specific design theory and practice in advance of their introduction to interdisciplinary collaboration. It is critical to train students well in their own disciplines before requiring them to bring their disciplinary expertise together with students from other programs.

Cluster Project The Cluster Project is launched at the beginning of the spring semester each year, and student teams focus on such complex problems as water resourcing, sustain-

InnovationSpace InnovationSpace (http://innovationspace.asu.edu/) is a joint venture between the disciplines of industrial design, visual communication design, business, engineering and sustainability. The program is built on the premise that a nontraditional transdisciplinary education provides the right kind of expertise and variation in thinking to handle the complex challenges of new product development. The effort requires teams of students from these disciplines to work in educational settings in which the boundaries are fluid and the knowledge is integrated. Here they learn how to create sustainable product concepts that have anticipated—and met—the rigors of real-world challenges on multiple fronts.

Students in InnovationSpace operate as teams in which traditional disciplinary roles often are mixed and matched.

The process of new product development that students follow in InnovationSpace is based on a model of innovation called integrated innovation, which guides them through four specific questions: n What is valuable to people? n What is possible through engineering? n What is desirable to the corporation? n What is good for society and the environment?

It is critical to have interdisciplinary teams in order to

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address these four questions. In the early stages during the fuzzy front end of new product development, students conduct research to gather information about people’s needs, technological opportunities and business concerns, as well as social and environmental issues. We encourage students to set aside their disciplinary affiliations as they conduct research in a designated problem area. In some cases, they do observations and interviews as a team.

As the project proceeds, the students dip into their disciplinary toolboxes to analyze the data collected. For example, the business students will perform SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analyses, and engineers will carry out technology benchmarking. As the information is compiled into one report, all students are required to understand the research and analysis tools used by their teammates. As a result, design students might use market mapping to critique products, while engineers help develop a list of the hierarchy of user needs. Such transdisciplinary learning creates a diversity that is tremendously beneficial to the class. Students and faculty contribute new resources, theoretical approaches, specialized methodologies and unique tools that advance the knowledge of the entire group. In the end, students understand the valuable lesson that other areas of expertise can improve the quality, depth and impact of their own work.

Co-Lab The Design Co-Lab is a 10-day competition that takes place at the beginning of the fall semester with all 4th-year (final) undergraduates. Students from architecture, industrial design, interior design, landscape architecture and visual communication design are organized into multidisciplinary teams mentored by faculty. This project asks students who plan to be designers of communities, buildings, spaces, products and interactive systems to create design proposals, objects, places, spaces or experiences based on a specific topic. Guest speakers and additional mentors from outside the school help guide the teams as they tackle complex issues. A website serves to disseminate information as

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well as offers opportunities for students to connect with the administration team, outside mentors and other resources.

Each team begins with a directed research and analysis activity, examining and documenting its own knowledge and experience with the topic. For example, with a topic of water resourcing, student teams might document their own water use for a 24-hour period. As personal and shared experiences are documented, students start recognizing behavioral patterns, identifying problem areas and visualizing potential solutions. Based on their research and analysis, each team is asked to design an experience that encourages others to reimagine their thinking and behavior about the problem.

Inspired by Max Bill, who famously said that design is “making of a new culture… from spoon to city,” we encourage students to work at all scales. Projects often range from infrastructure redesign to site and building design to individual product or visual communication system design.

Regardless of scale, student teams use design strategies to develop systemic solutions that enhance the experience of potential users. Each team produces a poster and a fiveminute stand-alone presentation, such as a video, interactive PDF, multimedia presentation or website.

Conclusion Each of these interdisciplinary collaborative projects presents a variety of educational benefits and challenges.

Observing student teams working together in devising solutions, making tradeoffs and managing the outcomes of the project is rewarding for faculty. Such opportunities help build independence and leadership skills and can be extremely beneficial when students graduate and launch their careers.

Transdisciplinary projects serve as a microcosm of the work environment and can therefore be beneficial from an employment perspective. However, managing cross-functional teams is by no means easy. It requires a broad as well as a deep understanding of the content in a variety of disciplines. Very often, cross-functional groups require regular team-building exercises so that they may learn to work well with each other and minimize friction between individuals.

As climate change, social inequities, food security and several other global problems continue to wreak havoc on people and the planet, the complexities of the design challenges we will be dealing with are expected to multiply significantly. Designers will be required to be familiar with working in multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams.

We will have to be more cognizant of the unique set of strengths each discipline brings to problem-solving while working in interdisciplinary teams. The issues that arise when disciplines collide will need to be managed through strategic planning, clear organization and regular maintenance. The discipline of design is undergoing a phenomenal transformation, and changing pedagogy is one of the most foundational approaches by which we can create better opportunities and increase the potential for success for future designers. n

By Warren Ginn, FIDSA warren@ginndesign.com Warren Ginn is principal of GinnDesign Product Development and adjunct professor of industrial design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. In addition to promoting materials and processes education within the design community, he was chair of the Materials and Processes Section for over 10 years and has served on the IDSA board as Section VP.

Teaching Materials and Processes

FROM EVANGELIST TO EDUCATOR

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or the past 20 years I have been promoting the value of materials and processes education within the industrial design community as well as working to improve collaboration between the industrial design, business, engineering and manufacturing communities. As designers of product

experiences that often manifest themselves in tangible manufactured artifacts, it is incumbent upon industrial designers to understand the nature of materials, their manufacturing processes and their relationship to a product’s design.

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During my tenure as the chair of the IDSA Materials and Processes Section, I was often contacted by professors and graduate teaching assistants tasked with teaching materials and manufacturing in their industrial design programs. They were seeking guidance on how to deliver this content to their students.

What textbooks should they use?

How should this information be presented? What are the most important concepts or ideas that need to be conveyed? These questions were a challenge to answer since the subject of materials and manufacturing is so broad and, for many institutions, time is limited in an increasingly crowded curriculum.

While I have been delivering workshops and presentations to students for years, only recently (Fall 2011) have I been involved in the teaching of a materials and processes class within an industrial design curriculum (NC State University, my alma mater). Despite my expertise in materials and manufacturing, teaching the subject to students proved much more challenging than I expected. This eyeopening experience has changed the way I think about this subject and how it might be taught. As I enter my fourth year teaching, I try to keep the following observations and insights in mind.

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Make the argument. As a champion for materials and processes education, educators should make the argument to their students: explain why materials and processes education is important to them as designers. As industrial designers, we should be constantly looking for ways to leverage our creativity and value within our organizations to serve as the product’s advocate through the entire design process. That empathy extends to all stakeholders in addition to the user experience, including marketing, research, engineering, manufacturing and beyond. Good design strives to keep all these needs satisfied.

By understanding how a product is manufactured and the implications of each decision made along the way, a designer can ensure that everyone’s objectives are met while the design intent is preserved (or at least while the appropriate compromises are made). If the designer doesn’t remain engaged to address these issues and be a part of that process, someone else will end up doing it.

Remember when you didn’t know. The technical and complex nature of materials and manufacturing can be quite challenging for some design students to learn and even more so to apply. Remembering what it was like when you first learned this subject can help you to identify with the struggles of your students. In his recognition of the shortcomings of lecture-based teaching, Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur points out that the better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach. We forget what it was like not to know something and learn it for the first time. This lack of empathy for those we are teaching creates a disconnect between the educator and student—making learning more difficult. Mazur’s solution is to engage the students in the process of teaching as well as learning by encouraging peer-based instruction in which the students who understand the material teach the students who are still struggling to learn it.

Distinguish between Internet knowledge and internal knowledge. Educators and students should differentiate between Internet knowledge and internal knowledge.

With ubiquitous access to the Internet, one might argue that simply having access to this information is as effective as knowing it. Unfortunately, there is no substitute for reading, understanding and internalizing the basic concepts of materials and manufacturing. This subject requires specific fundamental knowledge that includes a mastery of the language of materials and manufacturing. This understanding allows designers to communicate more effectively with engineers, materials suppliers and manufacturers.

It is also important to distinguish between what designers should know and what they should be able to look up.

Of course, there are considerable resources (like material databases and design guides) that designers can access online. But while these references are useful in developing specific design solutions (how thick does this nominal wall need to be?), they are no substitute for understanding the

basics of a manufacturing process or the general properties of a particular material. When sitting across the table from your client or a manufacturing engineer, stopping to look up the definition of “thermoforming” on your phone may not make the best impression.

Teach the language of manufacturing. I liken materials and processes education, with its specific technical jargon and terminology, to teaching a foreign language. There is a basic vocabulary (terms like “draft,” “nominal wall” and “undercut”) as well as conversational manufacturing (how you might discuss your product concepts with an engineer or manufacturer). Using these terms and expressions in class as well as in studio can help students become accustomed to using these terms correctly and understanding what they mean to them as designers.

Field trips are also extremely effective in exposing students to the manufacturing community and the language used. For programs located in areas where field trips to local manufacturers aren’t possible, consider inviting manufactur-

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ing reps and engineers as guest speakers to discuss how they work with industrial designers. They, too, will expose the students to this new language.

Connect materials to products. Associating specific materials and processes with specific types of products can be an effective method of understanding and remembering different material properties. One example might be to associate products that require chemical resistance and durability at a low cost with materials like polyethylene and polypropylene. Another example might be to associate commodity consumer electronics with ABS, but higher-end and more ruggedized electronics with ABS/PC. If a student understands why these products are associated with these materials, they can transfer those properties to new product concepts (leading to such a deduction as, “if polypropylene is used for this product, maybe it will make sense for this new project because it shares many of the same properties and performance characteristics”).

Understand where 3D printing and rapid prototyping fit. Like other rapid prototyping and molding processes, 3D printing should be taught as another viable manufacturing process. However, while the array of 3D printing technologies offer unique opportunities and specific advantages for certain applications, they’re not a panacea or universal replacement for all other processes. Every manufacturing process has its advantages and disadvantages, and 3D printing is no different. Students should understand where these technologies fit in their tool belts.

Create forensic designers. One measure of success for materials and processes education is the creation of life-long forensic designers. When designers are out in the world, every object they interact with should be an opportunity to ask, “How is this made and why?” and

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more importantly, “How could I make this product better?” By figuring out these answers for themselves, they learn from the experience and file that new knowledge away for future use.

I frequently do this myself (much to the exasperation of my wife), and hardware stores like Home Depot are my favorites. I hold my final materials and processes class at a Home Depot where the students and I tour the store pulling products off the shelf and discussing how they’re manufactured and why.

In addition, product autopsies or dissections are one of the most effective hands-on experiences where designers (young and old) can discover for themselves how products are manufactured. We all have products that are unused or broken that can be used as valuable learning opportunities, and the resulting parts can be contributed to your materials library.

Extend the reach of materials and processes education. With limited resources and an overburdened undergraduate curriculum, many industrial design programs are forced to require only one three-hour materials and processes class. However, courses in sketching, CAD, design research, entrepreneurship and professional practices as well as the industrial design studios all present opportunities to build on the concepts learned in the materials and processes class. By collaborating with other faculty members to interconnect these other core courses, this important content can be extended and reinforced throughout the program.

Make a connection. Every student is different and brings their own unique perspective, interests and method of learning to the classroom. Some students will be very enthusiastic about materials and processes, while others may require more support to make the subject relevant and compelling. Learning how to read the class and adjust to the students has taken some time, but teaching has taught me to be more reflective of my own work and approach to design and how to share my knowledge and experience with my students more effectively.

Recently a student sent me this email: “So tonight I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and found myself picking up random products and flipping them over, trying to guess what they were made out of. Haha, thanks for that.” Perhaps I’m starting to make a difference. n

By Katherine Bennett, IDSA and Elizabeth Sanders kbennett@artcenter.edu; sanders.82@osu.edu Katherine Bennett is an associate professor at Art Center College of Design teaching research, strategy and design/technology history at graduate and undergraduate levels. She has served as IDSA Vice President of Education, Western District Education Representative and LA Chapter Chair. n Elizabeth Sanders is an associate professor at The Ohio State University. She has been teaching design research at OSU since 1992 as an adjunct faculty member while working full-time in industry as a design research practitioner.

SPECIALIZED RESEARCH COURSES FOR DESIGN UNDERGRADUATES

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n recent conversations, we have been comparing notes on how research is taught at Art Center and Ohio State. With the growing demand in industry for design research practitioners, we see a compelling case for offering specialized research courses in undergrad industrial design programs, and we

thought we would share how our programs are doing this.

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what people: surface

deep

methods

knowledge

say think

interviews

do use

observations

observable tacit

know feel dream

generative sessions

explicit

latent

Liz Sanders and colleagues at the Delft University of Technology use this diagram to show how different research methods uncover different kinds of knowledge. (From “Contextmapping: Experiences from Practice,” which appeared in CoDesign, available at www.maketools.com/papers-2.html).

Research at Art Center College of Design I designed Art Center’s first dedicated required course for design research in 1991. It started as seven weeks of research concurrent with the 7th-term product design studio (the 7th term is equivalent to the first semester senior year), but evolved quickly to 14 weeks of research on a separate topic. In 1996, I also helped integrate research into the beginning product design studio coteaching as a research specialist with a design specialist. This course is still coled in the same way.

The ID Research course eventually became independent from the design studio. To teach advanced-level research methods, the course needed 14 weeks, while the design studios dedicated only four or five weeks to research.

Not only was there not enough time to teach research methodologies with any depth in the studios, the students experienced conflict between the different research timelines for the two connected courses, so we separated them.

Students gained command of research methods in ID Research in the 7th term, but needed that expertise earlier in the curriculum. We moved the course to the 5th term and began to expand research offerings in all studio courses. We also developed a research-only course in the 2nd term that provided an overview of all research methodologies used in design. This combination lecture and studio provided a hands-on introduction to design research methods at a beginning level. This course is still required of all majors, but in the Product Design program we recently replaced it with expanded research phases in all studio courses, advancing in complexity, length and breadth as students move through the curriculum.

Design research is now integrated into all studio courses, starting with a basic understanding of interviewing and observational techniques (understanding what people say

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and what they do) and introducing the concept of generative tools (understanding what people make). This instruction is repeated term by term, incrementally adding complexity and advanced knowledge.

We broadened the curriculum to include specialized research courses and components: two courses teaching lifecycle analysis and other research for sustainability; a course in color, materials and trends research; in situ ethnography for social impact design for our DesignMatters studios; and branding, positioning and entrepreneurial research for the 7th- and 8th-term studios.

In 2007 I developed advanced methods for teaching research for the ID Research course. Students learn to select and frame a topic and develop a research plan (weeks 1–4). They specify and recruit participants and conduct field interviews (weeks 5–9). The fieldwork includes three generative tools; students learn a rationale for choosing the right set based on the knowledge they seek. Building on knowledge from earlier terms, this is where students design and conduct research at a professional level.

Learning to frame, plan and conduct field research is not enough. Weeks 9–13 teach a systematic set of tools for analysis. In the past, analysis consisted of clustering sticky notes, standing back and asking ourselves “What have we got?” We found this insufficient; the conclusions were thin and obvious. Systematic analysis now uncovers insights that lead to viable, nonobvious design opportunities.

The research concludes with a presentation of these insights and their concomitant opportunities—fuel for the ideation phase. It is not enough to organize and present findings. Through the rigor of the analysis, our students are required to develop a point of view that informs a set of recommendations for action based on the insights from the research.

The research curriculum at Art Center continually evolves based on observations from faculty and feedback from the students. For the future, we are planning advanced design research labs as well as a track for design research specialization.

Research at The Ohio State University Design research has been an integral part of the undergraduate design curriculum at OSU since 1968 when two courses in design research were offered to all undergraduate design students. From 1968 to 1992 these courses were taught by design faculty members using a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises. In addition, design research has always been a component of the design studios.

When OSU transitioned from the quarter to the semester system in 2012, design research grew from two quarters to three semesters of required courses for all the design students at the undergraduate level.

Design Research One is required of all the design majors (industrial design, interior space design and visual communication design) in the first semester of their sophomore year. This is the foundational course in the design research curriculum. Students start with quick hands-on exercises to learn how to conduct and analyze research methods that fall into three categories: what people say, what people do and what people make.

They work in same-discipline teams on the first research project in which they are asked to evaluate a product, environment or communication by investigating what people say, do or say they do with regard to it. Their research findings feed into their final design studio project in each discipline.

For the second project, they conduct experiential design research on a topic of their own choosing. In mixed discipline teams, they investigate what others say, do and make with regard to the experience domain. At the end of the semester the students create individual design research portfolios that showcase the methods and tools with which they have had firsthand experience.

Design Research Two is required of all design majors in the first semester of their junior year. The mindset practiced for this semester is one of designing with people in contrast to the designing for people mindset that was practiced in Design Research One.

The students are presented with the choice of about 10 prearranged projects. Each project has a “client� from the outside who has agreed to help the students connect to people with whom the students will establish a participatory relationship. For example, the theme this year is healthy eating, and the clients include civic innovation activists, local nonprofit organizations, university experts and OSU Medical Center professionals. The student teams will use their design research and relationship-building skills to engage their client and other stakeholders in a co-designing process with a focus on the generative phase of the process. Working on real projects that have social impact is a challenge, but one that can be very rewarding.

Design Research Three is required of all design majors in their senior year. The students are separated into their majors now and are taught by a design faculty member from their major. This enables the students to learn about advanced-level discipline-specific research topics.

Several growth opportunities for design research at the undergraduate level are being considered at OSU. The first step would be to add more faculty with expertise in design research so that we can include more activities for teaching design research to those who minor in design and so that we can prepare for the first major in design research at the undergraduate level.

Specialized Design Research Course Importance Design research needs to be covered in specialized workshop courses outside the studio in undergraduate design programs. Students need this dedicated time to learn to plan and use a complex array of methods. Lecture-only courses do not give the hands-on experience students require. Four or five weeks of a term bring an understanding of how research is integrated into the design process, but is not enough to give the robust knowledge students need.

The insights and observations we ask undergraduates to make require a level of experience and maturity they might struggle to have. Understanding the intersecting values, requirements and points of view of the designer, client, culture and society as a whole requires design literacy at an advanced level. Our undergraduates need the opportunity to immerse themselves in research in order to meet this challenge. n

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By Sunand Bhattacharya, IDSA and Doris Wells-Papanek, IDSA sunand.bhattacharya@autodesk.com n doris@designlearning.us As a key member of the team, Sunand Bhattacharya manages Autodesk’s strategic education initiatives and the company’s future influence advocacy for its global academic markets. n As director of the Design Learning Network, Doris WellsPapanek collaborates with educators, practitioners and learners to integrate design learning into K–12 classrooms.

Certifying K-12 Teachers in Design Learning Integration

DESIGN (LEARNING) IS THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

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magine a middle-school history teacher integrating creative mental tools and design-based learning strategies along with a suite of high-impact digital tools designed to empower students to go far beyond learning traditional facts and figures about World War I. Learners are challenged to dig deep

into the cause of the war and the effect of more than four years of battles on the lives of millions of people around the globe. The unit of study begins with students grappling with the enormous scale of the Great War. Over 9 million soldiers and 7 million civilians died resulting in the most tragic conflict in all of history, which in turn paved the way for major political changes and irreparable revolutions within many nations.

As students sort through large amounts of diverse and often conflicting information, co-creation teams are self-selected based on areas of interest. Next, student teams engage in intense problem-finding experiences along with an openended inquiry process, followed by the refinement of a provocative problem statement, insightful iterative thinking, influential empathy mapping and perceptive visualizations.

As students dive deeper into their studies, they employ divergent thinking and storytelling to unearth key understandings and imaginative realizations from multiple points of view.

The project culminates with the students demonstrating what they have learned as well as continue to wonder about.

Students design a series of low-fidelity prototypes that lead to the use of digital tools to produce final renderings and a scale model of the team’s recommendation of how they would have ended the war in a respectful and peaceful manner.

The exceptional design learning experience described above is not far from reality. Over and above achieving rich knowledge of the subject matter, students are developing critical design and digital literacy skills, as well as complementary capacities in fluency. Cultivating design-based literacy skills prepares students for an ever-changing world as they learn to ask good questions, identify key problems and challenges, explore multiple perspectives

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and alternatives, and propose creative and innovative solutions. Furthermore, digital literacy skills offer students opportunities to practice real-world cognitive and technical skills as they learn how to use information and communicate technologies to find, evaluate, create and articulate information, as well as show evidence of their learning. Integrating design-based learning strategies and digital tools into the classroom provides students with windows of time to develop the capacity to work with fluent speed, ease and accuracy; to make effective choices; and to manipulate information across various domains, media and platforms.

Creating Effective Pathways to Design Learning Integration To this end, the Design Learning Network (www.designlearning.us) and Autodesk Education have joined forces to bring a much-needed Design Learning Integration Certification initiative to life. The long-term goal of this effort is to offer K–12 teachers higher-education integration programs that provide on-going design learning support as well as self-renewing access to technology resources. Upon completion of the certification, teachers will be prepared to serve as local design learning coaches within their classroom, teams, school and/or district.

Programs will guide K–12 teachers as they become immersed in the design learning process and prepare to make strategic shifts in their instructional practices. Alignment with relevant curriculum and standards will take place; choices will be made to ensure doable, timely and purposeful design learning engagements; and applicable content of high interest and value for all involved will be defined.

The Design Learning Network is comprised of highly motivated educators, designers, visionaries and industry leaders who are devoted to the development of highly effective design-based teaching and learning best practices. The Design Learning Network’s primary objective is to invite young people today to become confident and creative problem-solvers, act as purposeful makers, take ownership of their learning and make good choices.

A K–12 teacher participant in the Design Learning Network’s 2014 Symposium shared, “Design learning is essential to my students building critical connections between ideas and information; the Symposium reinforced the impact and importance of integrating design learning into my instructional best practices.” Furthermore, a K–12 student involved the Pre-Symposium Challenge reported, “I usually do the bare minimum, but our team was so invested in our ideas—we had forgotten this was a school project.”

Within this initiative, Autodesk Education serves as an essential link to like-minded technology companies that are passionate about empowering our next generation of creative problem solvers. Autodesk’s own Digital STEM Workshop aims to enhance teaching and learning practices in K–12 classrooms by engaging students in a collection of free curricular and software resources, with collaborative class projects led by leading architects, artists and animators.

Each project delivers measurable results aligned with College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Common Core State Standards

(CCSS), and the Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) curriculum. Regardless of their skill level, students gain core subject knowledge, useful vocabulary and practical skills while designing a better world.

How Can the Design Community Close the Gap? Disruptive technology-based entrepreneurs have served as initial catalysts of the maker movement and are now making some headway into K–12 lab spaces, libraries and classrooms. Within eight years’ time, the maker movement has made remarkable impact around the globe. Interweaving design learning into this effort will create a comprehensive and supportive teaching and learning environment at a more sustainable level.

We believe by engaging students in creative mental tools, effective design-based learning strategies and a suite of high-impact digital tools, learners will be better prepared for careers that have yet to be invented within a world of constant societal changes. Anchored in existing curricula, Design Learning Integration Programs will offer effective pedagogical links to meaningful assessments based on student learning needs. Student evaluations will measure the impact on learners’ levels of growth in understanding, application and transferability in regard to creativity, technology and software.

We are now seeking like-minded educational partners, advocacy and leadership councils, and industry leaders to serve as key contributors to the development and iterative implementation of statewide higher-education Design Learning Integration Certification Programs. Over the next three to five years, it is our aim to partner with five early-adopter higher-education institutions and associated K–12 schools to roll out strategically tiered programs to K–12 science, technology, engineering, art and math educators, followed by media center specialists and general education teachers. n

Please Join Us! Autodesk Education and the Design Learning Network welcome you to contribute ideas and resources. Your efforts are essential to the certification of K–12 Design Learning Coaches as they help students become creative problem solvers.

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By Jason O. Germany, IDSA jgermany@uoregon.edu Jason Germany is an assistant professor of product design at the University of Oregon where his research interests include mobile computing, technology adaptation, entrepreneurship and design methods. Previous to his academic appointment, he worked as a senior industrial designer where his work received numerous patents as well as regional, national and international awards, including an IDEA Gold for consumer products.

Locality in Design Studios

ENGAGING MUNICIPALITIES

H

uddled around a hydraulic tool that looks more like an object from a science fiction movie than from a rescue kit, stu-

dents engage in a rewarding dialog between user and designer. They feverishly take notes and pictures while probing for insights that may provide an opportunity to leverage their skills and address an unmet need. This give and take carries on down a line of trucks filled with equipment ranging from garden rakes to self-contained breathing apparatus.

Melas Street Lighting – City of Salem, OR; Students: Charlie Hartzell, Damien Menard-Oxman, Ian Kenny

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All the while students are transformed for a brief time from apprentices to immersed researchers. This state of inquiry is ultimately broken by the ringing of a deafening bell and the hurried response of personnel attending to their individual assignments that culminate in a 25-ton vehicle driving out a roller door and down the street with lights and sirens blaring. After the dust clears, the only thing that remains are the smiles and quiet chatter of 15 product design students as they exit their local fire station.

Education and Service That event was the result of a senior studio class at the University of Oregon’s Product Design program in collaboration with the Eugene-Springfield Fire Department. This alliance enabled students to investigate and design for a high-risk domain that many professionals rarely have the opportunity to tackle. Tasked with topics ranging from prevention and investigation to personal protective equipment and communications, these students worked directly with individuals and groups from the fire marshal’s office as well as operations.

Although the collaboration was focused on fire and rescue, the larger framework for this relationship is one of higher education engaging with city governments, a structure that extends beyond a specific domain and focuses on providing a civic exchange between student, academic institution and local municipality. This exchange seeks to provide a design studio platform as well as an element of service. Part of higher education’s mission is to not only provide for research and teaching but service back to the state or locale in which it resides. Such outreach to the local or regional citizens has its roots in the Wisconsin Idea, a century-old concept advocated by the then Wisconsin governor, Robert La Follette.

This general scheme became widely accepted among other institutions throughout the United States, most notably in the

western portion of the country. As universities have increasingly become national and even international centers for knowledge, however, some of the focus on locality has been lost.

Aside from academic missions, cities, too, are primed for these collaborations.

After the recent economic downturn, it was not only the private sector that felt the impact of decreased revenue and limited resources but also many US cities, some of whom declared bankruptcy. With more than half the world’s population living in urban locations, cities have been forced to manage resources, spaces and services on ever-tightening budgets. As a result, the opportunity for design and design education to have an impact on this problem space is timely.

Accessibility and Context Connection to industry has long been a component in professionally oriented academic disciplines. Whether engineering, business or design, these fields of study have consistently relied on joint ventures between industry and academia in both the classroom and faculty research. Perhaps the most prevalent of these collaborations is that of the corporate-sponsored studio.

Design education is informed by but also comes to inform professional practice, so it makes sense that student work is framed with outside constraints.

Although these interchanges continue to be an invaluable component in design education, this classroom model also presents challenges. In their paper titled “Sponsored Design Studios,” Kern Maass, IDSA and Banks Talley identify issues that can arise regarding sponsor vetting, donation dollars, intellectual property, liability and project scope, to name but a few. In many cases, academic institutions have contract approaches that address these potential issues, but all the same, these components represent a potential hurdle in the alignment between student and applied learn-

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ing. The benefit of studio course work focused on design problems in a community or municipality is that many of these issues can be avoided altogether.

Fundamentally, cities are not in the business of capitalizing on intellectual property or particular consumer innovations, which can provide for a unique and candid dialog between student, civil servant and citizen.

Another benefit to this format is that municipal agencies play a role closer to that of the client. The particular dynamic that happens between client and designer is one that is often hard to replicate in undergraduate education. Corporate-sponsored studios may lend themselves to this dynamic, but oftentimes the liaison from the company is a designer or comes from a design group. In the studios partnered with municipalities, the contact or point person likely doesn’t have a design background and therefore functions more like a client. This means that students have to engage in problem framing and communication exercises that make their research findings and concepts accessible to individuals outside of their native discipline—a valuable skill for any student and

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PASS fire fighter interface – City of Eugene, OR; Student: Jessica Giden

one that is relevant to future consultants as well as interdisciplinary designers.

Beyond the client and designer exchange, exploring design problems close to home offers many advantages.

As many design educators will attest, the need to provide students with a problem space that allows for direct primary research and engagement is something that can prove challenging at times. With nearly 40,000 local governments in the United States alone, design programs have worthy problems to address that are right at their doorstep. Amid such opportunities, the local stakeholder in the project extends beyond just the city government to include the local citizenry as well. Instead of conducting research for abstracted user groups, which classes may have limited access to, students have the opportunity to observe and interview participants in their everyday environment. This can provide for a contextual, spatial and cultural grounding that fits well within the aims of applied learning that is marked by primary research and design studio practice.

Interdisciplinary Scope and Scalability In his report “Designing Design Education” (http://old.sigchi.org/bulletin/1998.3/education.html), Daniel Boyarski highlights some of his findings from a National Science Foundation workshop that examined the future of design education. One of the major recommendations from this workshop is the need for design education to increase its focus on interdisciplinary work. The future is complex and at times uncertain and will not be addressed by individuals but by diverse groups. A city by its very nature is a complex system, and the management and design of that system requires individuals from a range of disciplines. The predominate design side of this equation is often considered to be one held by those with planning or architectural backgrounds. Consider, though, that the urban landscape is covered with human-scaled objects, spaces and potential interactions. This is prime territory for industrial designers and more specifically design students to collaborate with

other disciplines as the profession continues to expand its role beyond the consumer product definition of 20 years ago.

Providing students with an interdisciplinary experience can at times be challenging within the framework of larger academic institutions. Applied learning projects, like those found within the urban domain, can provide the catalyst for collaborations across disciplines. Although the scale of a studio project can be as focused as a singular discipline working to address a need within the community, there are also examples in which academic-led initiatives reach beyond the discipline to provide a more holistic approach.

Within the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, the Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) has been coordinating just such an effort for the last five years.

The Sustainable City Year is a program that partners student course work with cities in Oregon for an entire academic year. Nico Larco, co-director of SCI and associate professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, remarked that the program benefits multiple interests and that “on the one hand, students get handson experience that makes them more effective professionals and agents of change, and on the other, cities receive a flood of creativity, direct assistance, and access to best practices. It is a win-win-win.” In the process, students ranging from architecture and planning to product design and journalism assist municipalities in attaining their shortand long-term goals.

Above: Versatilis fire hydrant – City of Eugene, OR; Student: Eugene Tseng

Design and Conversations Although the resulting concepts and recommendations from students may not always be directly implemented by agencies, part of the goal in this engagement is about creating a conversation as well as a solution. The conversation starts between a city and a set of student designers but extends beyond that. After the class is done and students have moved on to their next adventure, the impact their concepts have on the agency go beyond object, poster and presentation. Their concepts and the inquiries generated by the students begin new conversations between agencies within a city as well as between the city and its citizens.

At the end of the day, design and designers have the ability to conduct research and summarize findings as well as to synthesize these insights into future possibilities that make the work accessible to a larger audience. Designers hold a unique position in society. They comment not only on the current condition of the world but more importantly on how the world could be. This is a powerful lesson for students to learn and one that should start close to home. n

Vesta fire extinguisher – City of Eugene, OR; Student: Claire Sakaguchi

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By Pascal Malassigné, FIDSA, Sooshin Choi, IDSA, Thomas Amerson, Krista Alley, Soojin Kim and Kevin Alexander pascalmalassigne@miad.edu n sooshin@collegeforcreativestudies.edu Pascal Malassigné is a senior professor and chair of industrial design at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. n Sooshin Choi is provost and vice president for academic affairs, professor of design, College for Creative Studies. n Thomas Amerson, PhD is a retired government researcher and member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. n Krista Alley and Soojin Kim are Master of Design students at the University of Cincinnati. n Kevin Alexander is a senior industrial design student at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

The 2013–14 Education Survey

DESIGN EDUCATION

BY THE NUMBERS

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he 2013-14 IDSA Education Survey, sponsored by the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and the University of Cincinnati, is a follow-up to the first Education Survey conducted in 2010.

A preliminary presentation of the 2013–14 survey took place at the 2013 IDSA Education

Conference in Chicago. Subsequently, additional data was obtained to offer a more complete picture of industrial design education. The overarching goal has been, since the first survey, to provide the industrial design educational community data not available in the IDSA Compensation Studies. The authors thank the 51 schools that responded and hope that all schools will contribute to the next survey in 2016.

Among the many stages of professional design training, the focused education obtained in colleges and universities must be regarded as one of the most important. It is in these settings that the emerging professional learns the language, culture, ethics, communication techniques, technology and business of industrial design. In these settings faculty members share their academic and professional experiences and provide students with real-world design opportunities through courses and projects. Therefore, any assessment of the health of the design profession needs to include periodic assessments of the educational stage that typically begins the journey of an industrial designer.

Because industrial design education serves varied audiences, an assessment must consider many factors. Majors in industrial design are offered in state universities and private art and design schools both in the United States and abroad. The programs vary in size, the degree offered, the number and rank of faculty, the number of students, and the level of support and funding received. Potential employers find it helpful to know more about the relative strengths and reputation of the schools when they are considering applicants’ portfolios. Students are interested in scholarships and financial aid, the number of students and faculty, gender

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composition and, of course, the job placement rate. Faculty and administrators are interested in student demographics, faculty salaries and funding opportunities. This article provides the industrial design education community with the most recent data about its state of the art.

Demographics Of the 51 schools that participated in this Education Survey, 49 percent were state schools and 51 percent were private.

The chart on the bottom left shows the school representation by type (state or private); the one on the right shows school representation by district.

Schools Represented

Fifty of the schools offer undergraduate degrees in industrial design; one school offers only a graduate program.

Twenty-three of the schools offering undergraduate degrees also offer graduate degrees. Private and state schools were nearly evenly represented with 26 and 25 schools responding, respectively. Growth in enrollment has been positive over the past three years with 83 percent of the schools reporting increased enrollment in their undergraduate programs. Unfortunately, data were available for only seven of the graduate programs, but six of those reported growth during the past three years. Enrollment in the graduate program in the Northeast district showed the greatest gain.

No schools, undergraduate or graduate, reported a decline in enrollment. These increases in enrollment have led to notable increases in faculty size in the Western, Southern and International districts.

Many of the schools responded that they provide internships (43 percent), sponsored programs or cooperative programs (77 percent) or both (38 percent) in order to expand the students’ experiences beyond the academic setting. More of these programs were offered in private than state schools and in graduate than undergraduate programs.

Internships, sponsored programs or cooperative programs were provided across the IDSA districts surveyed with particular emphasis in the Western, Midwest and Central districts. Placement programs were prevalent in the Midwest, Northeast and International districts. The tables below provide data on internship/cooperative and placement programs for state and private schools by program type and by district.

Additional Programs Offered

Finances An important factor in any academic program is the annual budget. Of the 36 schools responding to the question regarding the annual budget of their industrial design program, 72 percent reported a budget of under $1.0 million; however, 28 percent indicated a budget of $1.0–2.5 million. Private schools tend to lag state schools with only 12 percent of private schools reporting an annual budget of $1.0–2.5 million compared with 42 percent of the state schools reporting higher budgets. Budgets varied remarkably by district as well.

Annual Budget

Income from other sources (such as grants, sponsored projects, gifts, research and funded endowments) is important to industrial design programs. In 2013, other income received by schools varied from $5,000 to $250,000 with a median of $50,000 and a mean of $90,000. Private schools averaged $67,000 in other income, while state schools averaged more than double that amount at $137,000. The average other income by district was between $120,000 and $140,000, with the exception of the Western ($61,000) and Northeast ($48,000) districts.

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D E S I G N E DUCATI O N

Faculty Faculty members are employed with nine- or 12-month contracts or are on part-time or term contracts. State schools also employ graduate students to assist in instruction. Private schools tend to employ on a part-time or term basis; state schools tend to employ on nine- or 12-month contracts. The charts below illustrate the terms of employment data for all schools responding the survey. The private and state school data are provided as well as the terms of employment that show some differences when viewed by district.

Faculty & Staff Demographics

Terms of Employment Terms of Employment by District

Salaries

Faculty and staff salaries for schools offering undergraduate and graduate programs are shown in the table to the left.

The high, low and average values are provided for all ranks, male and female. Unfortunately, data were not available from all schools and resulted in various inconsistencies in patterns of salary values (for example, higher salaries for private school associate professors than for private school full professors).

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Students The schools responding to the survey had a total reported enrollment in various design disciplines of 21,825. Of that there were 4,984 majors in industrial design programs, 328 of whom were graduate students. The tables to the right provide data on the students registered (all programs), industrial design majors and undergraduate degrees awarded by type of school (state or private) and district.

The schools responding to the Education Survey provide a clear picture of their students’ ability to find employment after graduation. Within six months of graduation, 65 percent of the students had found a position in design.

Only 1 percent of the graduates did not find a design position within one year. The schools reported that, to their knowledge, 5 percent of the graduates have not found work (type unspecified). Differences in finding employment in design were seen between undergraduate and graduate Time to Find Employment students. Within six months, 60 percent of the undergraduate students found a design position compared with 88 percent of the graduate students for the same period. Many of the undergraduates (25 percent) required nine to 12 months to find employment compared with only 6 percent of the graduate students for the same period.

Although the job outlook for industrial design students is generally good, graduate students appear to obtain employment faster than undergraduate students. The charts to the right compare the time to obtain employment for undergraduates by type of school (state or private) and by district.

Assessment of the education of our designers is important for understanding the financial commitment to industrial design programs, the number of graduates the profession can expect and the job placement rate students can expect after graduation. Periodic education surveys such as this provide valuable feedback to the industrial design community. n

Number of Students Represented

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By Juan Antonio Islas Munoz, Kyrsten Sanderson and Cecilia Arredondo islasmja@ucmail.uc.edu n kyrstensanderson@gmail.com n ceciap@gmail.com Juan Antonio Islas Munoz is a visiting professor in the industrial design program at the University of Cincinnati where he has led interdisciplinary projects for the graduate and undergraduate level. n Kyrsten Sanderson is a user experience designer at Karten Design in Los Angeles. Her passion lies in creating experiences that streamline tasks while providing joy to the user. n Cecilia Arredondo is a designer and educator in Queretaro, Mexico, with a Master of Design from the University of Cincinnati where she focused on playful design in medical device design.

Design & Medicine

NATURAL PARTNERS

M

edical device development and industrial design, in principle, aim for the same goal: improving people’s quality of life through innovation. While they accomplish this objective differently, both use approaches that are complementary to one another.

The development of medical devices requires agencydefined methodologies, including verification at several stages and consideration of standards in practice, such as AAMI human factors. The approach to medical device development is detail oriented and science-based. It focuses on knowledge of human physiology, advanced technology and manufacturing processes with a heavy dose of usability. The practice of industrial design includes flexible methodologies, specializing in problem-solving through innovative solutions. It aims at maximizing the design of devices and environments to meet the users’ needs, both technical and humane. In order to design a medical device that truly meets the needs of both users and regulating bodies, collaboration between industrial designers and medical practitioners is necessary.

The College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning; the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences; and the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati regularly partner with the healthcare/medical device industry in order to explore the application of industrial design methodologies to the processes in medical device development. This collaborative relationship has created an atmosphere in which students can focus their undergraduate and graduate work on generating innovation within this growing field. The following examples articulate these activities.

Designing for the Operating Room The Medical Device Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program involves students and faculty from all colleges.

It takes on clinical problems at the interface of man-made objects and patient anatomy. In any given semester, between 15 and 20 problems are explored from problem

Industrial design student Erin Wenig observes a case in the operating room at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

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identification to conceptual development and design verification testing. Students practice design while using regulatory agency practices with the appropriate application of human factors and documentation, and they routinely observe live cases. For example, 4th-year industrial design student Erin Wenig observed surgery as part of a contextual inquiry relevant to her current project working with Dr. Krish Gaitonde, who specializes in robotic surgery and is co-director of the minimally invasive/robotic surgery fellowship. Students are also required to build functional prototypes for testing.

Alum Kevin Zylka worked as part of an undergraduate team designing a device that occludes (blocks off) the left atrial appendage (a part of the heart in which clots are believed to form that eventually may cause strokes). This device was built and tested using a pig heart (from the meat market) connected to a pulsatile pump.

Breaking Communication Barriers in Emergency Medicine Kyrsten Sanderson worked closely in collaboration with the UC Department of Emergency Medicine on her thesis, which explores how healthcare providers interact with limited English proficient (LEP) patients. Design research approaches such as contextual inquiry, product benchmarking, role playing, process mapping and co-design were used to investigate current practices and identify innovation opportunity areas. This front-end research generated the primary conclusion that providers and LEP patients have the most difficulty with spontaneous communication of routine information at the bedside. This discovery led to the generation of design inputs that were created collaboratively with providers to inspire concept ideation. As a result, two concepts were created and tested using a novel concept evaluation tool to gain qualitative feedback and acceptance among providers. Beyond the design outcome, this research generated valuable insights for facilitating interaction between design teams and healthcare providers.

Applying Consumer Product Development Approaches to Medical Device Development Cecilia Arredondo designed a device that assists in the visualization and removal of air bubbles during interventional neuroradiology procedures. This device sought to minimize the time and maximize the accuracy of the task. However,

Kyrsten Sanderson conducting a role-playing activity with an emergency medicine nurse.

its true mission was to explore the use of metaphor in form in a highly conservative context, using the device design as the vehicle to achieve this goal.

Realizing typical medical device colors are limited to silver, white or the blue/green of scrubs, she decided to purposefully try a new approach, embracing emotional design and her Mexican culture. She then assessed the user community for tolerance. Initially users were both amused and enlightened with the shape proposals presented in 2D. However, once built as fully functional prototypes and reviewed in context, the real-world conservative nature of these professionals took hold. In their evaluations of the prototypes, users placed more value on applied ergonomics and were less concerned with aesthetics. Although this feedback came from a rather small sample size and only one specialty, the ability to apply typical consumer product development approaches in the medical field is of importance to the industrial design community. It will be a fantastic day when we walk into a hospital designed for adults that appeases our need for beauty.

Improving Adherence in Transitioning Child-toAdult Patients with Chronic Conditions Juan Antonio Islas Munoz participated in a project in which the Live Well Collaborative (LWC) and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) collaborated during the summer of 2014. LWC is an organization founded in 2007 by the University of Cincinnati and P&G that takes a multidisciplinary approach, using design-thinking methodologies to develop sponsored fuzzy front-end projects. These are

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3D proposals of conservative (orange), moderately conservative (black and white), and imbued designs presented to the user community.

executed by graduate and undergraduate student teams.

Linda Dunseath, executive director of LWC expressed: “The magic of working with designers is that they have the ability to clearly visualize research insights and translate them into solutions. Students come with a fresh, unjaded perspective, which allows for more advanced and holistic solutions.”

Dr. Kevin Hommel, leader of the Center for Adherence and Self-Management at CCHMC, identified the need for a device that would improve adherence to medical treatments by children ages 11–18 with chronic conditions by dispensing medication, tracking intake, and collecting data for medical providers and researchers. The design team, composed of Stacy He, Luying Sun, Alfredo Ruiz Costilla and Juan Antonio Islas Munoz, who were advised by UC faculty Steve Doehler, IDSA, performed research by going through literature reviews, product benchmarking, and conducting interviews with physicians, researchers and pharmacists, as well as in-home and Skype interviews with CCHMC patients. The team synthesized the information and found opportunity areas by creating storyboard scenarios. Several concepts were generated in co-creation with patients. Hommel’s team gave feedback on the concepts, and patients selected and validated a concept for further refinement. The final concept manages and dispenses medication and connects intake to a regular routine, thus helping users take their medication on a regular schedule, and adapts as the patient evolves from a child to a young adult. Hommel expressed his opinion about working with designers: “What I have been impressed with is the creativity, perspective, and ability to summarize patient preferences that the design team has brought to the project. Also I’ve been pleased with the practical approach. While the designs are highly technical, they are realistic, and there has been much thought given to the mechanical requirements from the design team. This is essential to designing and producing a product that is feasibly employed in the healthcare marketplace.”

Current Challenges in Medical Device Design The contrasting approaches between medical device development and industrial design present a steep learning curve for designers involved in the collaboration of these two fields. Some challenges include: n

Revolutionary change is more difficult than evolutionary change. Solid information from thorough research and concept evaluation is required to justify overcoming the challenges innovative ideas bring.

n

Designspeak is different than medspeak. Technically biased stakeholders can be resistant to flexible out-ofthe-box methodologies. Information visualization in the research phase is a great tool to bridge this gap.

Qualitative prompts, even though they may be as important, tend to be disregarded over quantitative ones during research. Multidisciplinary collaboration between designers and providers is indispensable for the understanding between both fields.

n

Design with a capital “D” is deemed irrelevant.

Concepts such as fun, attractive and enjoyable are frequently downplayed. Experience has shown that users, mainly but not exclusively patients, appreciate the humane side of the healthcare experience. Design should continue campaigning for the application of these concepts.

n

Access to primary users is difficult. Particularities natural to their situation make contact difficult, which slows down the design process.

In order to overcome these challenges, it is important for designers and university collaborations to become more effective in selling the idea that design can improve medical device development. The best way to do it is by developing highly innovative and technically feasible solutions that prove the added value of design. n Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Mary Beth Privitera, IDSA, who kindly shared vital information for the writing of this article.

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IDSA STUDENT CHAPTER SHOWCASE IDSA Student Chapters participating: Academy of Art University Appalachian State University Arizona State University Art Institute of Colorado Brigham Young University California State University, Long Beach Carleton University Carnegie Mellon University Cleveland Institute of Art

Cranbrook Academy Drexel University NC State Pratt Institute Purdue University Rochester Institute of Technology San José State University SCAD Shintaro Akatsu School of Design Southern Illinois University

Syracuse University University of Cincinnati University of Houston University of Louisiana at Lafayette University of Michigan University of Oregon University of Pennsylvania University of Utah Walla Walla University

This special section in INNOVATION is sponsored by the College for Creative Studies.

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs at the College for Creative Studies build on CCS’ legacy of art and design education excellence and address the demands of a globally competitive environment. We focus on fostering critical thinking in a design context while keeping contemporary business reality in mind. CCS offers four MFA programs—Color & Materials Design, Integrated Design, Interaction Design and Transportation Design. The Integrated Design program synthesizes multiple disciplines, using an effective combination of design strategy, business acumen and creative execution to prepare students for professional practice. We emphasize a holistic yet cohesive problem-based and industry-relevant curriculum with the related disciplines contributing to the solution. In the Color & Materials Design program, the first program of its kind in the United States, students build an advanced knowledge of color, new materials, finishes and processes to develop a practitioner’s expertise in their application to various design solutions. The Interaction Design program is grounded in the human context of design—the study of how people use, need and respond to technology in their daily lives. Through a rigorous curriculum emphasizing userbased research and an entrepreneurial outlook, students develop the aesthetic and technical skills relevant to a rapidly evolving and growing field. The Transportation Design program develops designers who are not just stylists but innovators with an eye toward the future. Students are immersed in the most pressing issues of mobility and technology affecting the global transportation design industry today.

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Creativity Matters

Cole Mishler ’13 Product Design

Calvin Tabor ’12 Appliance Design

Konnor Bartels ’16 Footwear Design

Brian Peterson ’09 Transportation Design

Vincent Marazita ’14 Toy Design

Wendy Birchfield ’11 Furniture Design

With a curriculum focused on research, conceptualization, and refinement; a strong tradition of sponsored class projects; and connections to productive internships; Cleveland Institute of Art’s Industrial Design major educates designers who go on to excel in the fields of their dreams. cia.edu

SINCE 1882

Pratt Institute | Industrial Design

Pratt Institute offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs in industrial design that promote creative problem solving and critical thinking. The department’s mission is to teach aesthetic value and form development, focusing on the principles of accessibility, responsibility, and creativity. Pratt’s diverse faculty of practicing design professionals and location in the creative hub of New York City fuel student explorations into designing the forms of the future.

Images, top to bottom: Nikolaos Georgantas 3-D/Form and Space Undergraduate Instructor: Linda Celentano Lisa Dudley | Radiant Space Heater 3-D III | Graduate Fall 2012 Instructor: Lucia Derespinis Yuxin Han | Canvas Urban Walking Sneakers Shoe Prototypes Undergraduate Fall 2012 Instructor: Kevin Crowley

www.pratt.edu

Photo: Hassib Jordan

IKEA Hรถnshus Chicken Coop Design: Yanan Kang

Hand-held Vacuum Design: Lauren Davidson

Industrial Design sjsu.edu/design Photo: Hassib Jordan

Arbor Project A collaboration with the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, the SJSU Industrial Design Program and Stoller Studios.

Sophie Park & Wellness System Design: Tommy Duong

DESIGNING GLOBAL SOLUTIONS At the Savannah College of Art and Design, industrial design students combine academic knowledge and design skills with real-world experience. Recently, they created groundbreaking solutions that made it all the way to the world stage of production design. Seven SCAD alumni and students were recognized at the prestigious international Red Dot Awards in Singapore.

Of the more than 4,700 submissions from 60 countries around the globe, Red Dot presented 40 Best of the Best Awards. SCAD is one of only three U.S. colleges with student winners of this coveted award.

KIRA A balance of simplicity and innovation Sebastian Campos Möller (B.F.A., industrial design, 2012) Red Dot Award Winner “Kira” was designed to bridge the gap between sailing and motor yachting, so those who take to the winds can do so in the most comfortable, amenable and sustainable way. It is designed to have a zero carbon footprint because of its electric engine and solar sail, giving the owner absolute freedom to roam the seas in complete comfort. “Kira,” his undergraduate thesis, is a representation of his design ethos, a balance of simplicity and innovation.

TOY CART PLUS Keeping children challenged and engaged Yue Jia (M.A., industrial design, 2014) Red Dot Award Winner Toy Cart Plus crosses the barrier between indoors and outdoors while changing configurations to keep the child challenged and engaged. In the long term, the ability to update a toy, rather than totally replace it, saves money and resources.

THE RETRIEVER CITY PARKING AND RESERVING SYSTEM We saved you a spot Jian Shi (M.F.A. industrial design student) Qing Xu (M.A., industrial design, 2014) Weijing Zhao (M.F.A. industrial design student) Yunman Gu (M.F.A. industrial design student) Holly Chisholm (B.F.A. industrial design student) Red Dot Award Winner – Best of the Best The Retriever City Parking and Reserving System allows drivers to search for, find, book and pay for a parking spot anywhere with their smartphones, using the Retriever app. The Retriever City Parking and Reserving System solves this global big city problem and it earned the design team a Best of the Best Red Dot Design Award. The Best of the Best is a top recognition given to groundbreaking concepts in the field of production design.

Learn more, contact us at industrialdesign@scad.edu, or call 912.525.6431.

scad.edu/industrial-design

Industrial and Interaction Design For information please contact the Department of Design office at (315) 443-2455 or email inquiries to design@syr.edu

Designing Across Disciplines The iWall Modular Light-Filtration System Team

SmartSurfaces Students from

Westley Josiah Burger Taubman College

Stamps, the Taubman

Peter Hall

Architecture College and

Stamps School of Art & Design

Michigan Engineering

Brieana MacDonald

work together in

Taubman College

SmartSurfaces, a

Michael Mathieu Material Science and Engineering

collaborative, project

Taylor McKenzie-Veal

based class where

Stamps School of Art & Design

teams of students build

Neil Poulin

systems (physical and

Material Science and Engineering

electronic) into ‘smart’ surfaces that adapt to their environment and incoming information.

Integrated Product Development (IPD)

Storage Unit Team

IPD puts teams

Arlene Zhoa

Max Berger Stamps School of Art & Design Business School

of students from

Yunjeong Choi

Business, Engineering,

Business School

Architecture, and

Masayuki Kawasaki

Stamps in a competitive

Business School

product development

Alex Yang Engineering

environment. This past year’s assignment: design dormitory furniture that can be easily assembled by the consumer from locally fabricated parts and standard catalog hardware.

Cook Stove Team Abijah El-Fakih Simon Program in the Environment

Corey Walsh Pre-Med

Alexandra Pears, Christina Bennett, Duston Park, Elizabeth Ploch, Ian Roos, Keyana Thompson-Shaw, Mallory Uchlik, Melissa Cho, Michael Benkarski

International Design Stamps students worked in Tanzania with local

Stamps School of Art & Design

community members, and

Haley Evans

students from Program

Biology

Ian Klipa

in the Environment,

Engineering

Engineering and Pre-Med

Josie Palalon

to design and build cost

Engineering

efficient, environmentally

Man Kuan Lei Biology

friendly cook stoves for Maasai homes.

For more information contact Professor Bruce Tharp at bmtharp@umich.edu. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan

Product Design at Oregon 1 SALONE SATELLITE EXHIBITION IN

MILAN, ITALY, WITH STUDENT WORK BY RITA CLARE, LIZ ZARRO, SEAN LEYDEN, JESSICA GIDEN, SARAH PIERCE, ZANDER ECKBLAD, YAWEI ZHANG, CHRIS LAU, JOSH LARSEN, AND BROOKE ANDERSON

1

2 DAMIEN MENARD-OXMAN, CHARLIE

HARTZELL, AND IAN KENNY, MELAS LED STREETLIGHT, “EFFICIENT PUBLIC LIGHTING OPTIONS FOR SALEM, OREGON, SUSTAINABLE CITIES YEAR”

3 TERESSA CHIZECK, ADAM HORBINSKI,

JEREMY ANDROSCHUK, SCOTT WARNEKE, AND IAN KENNY, 2011 OREGON MANIFEST CONSTRUCTOR’S DESIGN CHALLENGE, STUDENT CATEGORY WINNER; AND 2012 INTERNATIONAL DESIGN EXCELLENCE AWARDS, GOLD AWARD

4 KATIE LEE, “6 SHADES OF GREY,”

WILSONART CHALLENGES 2013 WINNER

5 IAN MCCUAIG, BACKPACK WITH SUPPORTIVE LAPTOP STORAGE

Join us in designing a better world.

2

3

4

5

BA OR BS IN MATERIAL AND PRODUCT STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, EUGENE

BFA IN PRODUCT DESIGN UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, PORTLAND

MS IN SPORTS PRODUCT DESIGN* UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, PORTLAND

MDES IN PRODUCT DESIGN* UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, EUGENE *PENDING APPROVAL, STARTING 2016.

APPLY JANUARY 15 VISIT THE WEBSITE FOR APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS.

pd.uoregon.edu

ACCREDITATION | NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOLS OF ART AND DESIGN | NORTHWEST COMMISSION ON COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

PRODUCT DESIGN PROGRAM | 254 LAWRENCE HALL, 5282 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, EUGENE, OREGON 97403-5282 541-346-6697 | PDINFO@UOREGON.EDU An equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication will be provided in accessible formats upon request. © 2014 University of Oregon MC1114-001wm

1.

2.

Matt Bernard (B.S. Design ‘16) Inflatable lighting solutions for the outdoors.

Court Skabelund (B.S. Design ‘15) Dane Antes (B.S. Design ’15) John Fabela (B.S. Design ‘16)

Matt Parkin (B.S. Design ’15) 1. Adaptive pedal for cyclists with spinal cord injuries.

Re-design of the hospital crash-cart.

Court Skabelund (B.S. Design ‘15) 2. Adaptive shifting apparatus for cyclists with spinal cord injury.

Matt Parkin (B.S. Design ‘15) Brooke Keene (B.S. Design ‘15) Tanner Gould, Alex Muzio

Alex Pastucha (B.S. Design ‘15)

Remington Plewe (B.S. Design ‘15)

Modular bear canister.

Adaptive pedal for cyclists with spinal cord injuries.

Re-design of the hospital crash-cart.

Matt Parkin (B.S. Design ‘15)

Justin Pok (B.S. Design ‘16)

Mckay Nilson (B.S. Design ‘16)

This infusion pump concept and interface design centered on improving the users speed and accuracy when accessing medication needs and adjusting infusion rates.

MULTI-DISCIPLINARY DESIGN

COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE + PLANNING / UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

DESIGN.UTAH.EDU

@uofu_design #uofudesign

Packaging by Nicole Willer, for Marbles®, the Brain Store

Custom greenhouse design by Laura Riley, Summer Morning

Designing for People Design by Matthew Shevitz for Dick’s® Sporting Goods

tech.wallawalla.edu • 509.527.2712

Graduate Studies in Design MFA Color & Materials Design

In the Color & Materials Design program, the first Master’s program of its kind in the United States, students build an advanced knowledge of color, new materials, finishes and processes to develop a practitioner’s expertise in their application to various design solutions.

MFA Integrated Design

The Integrated Design program integrates multiple disciplines, using an effective combination of design strategy, business acumen and creative execution to prepare you for professional practice. We emphasize a holistic but cohesive, problem-based and industry-relevant curriculum with the related disciplines contributing to the solution.

MFA Interaction Design

The Interaction Design program is grounded in the human context of design – the study of how people use, need and respond to technology in their daily lives. Through a rigorous curriculum emphasizing user-based research and an entrepreneurial outlook, students develop the aesthetic and technical skills relevant to a rapidly evolving and growing field.

MFA Transportation Design

The Transportation Design program develops designers who are not just stylists but innovators with an eye towards the future. Students are immersed in the most pressing issues of mobility and technology affecting the global transportation industry today.

CCS is ranked the #3 design school in the U.S. and best in the Midwest based on alumni success — LinkedIn Top Ranked University 2014–15 Visit www.collegeforcreativestudies.edu for more information.

S H O W CASE

SHOOT FOR THE STARS “The universe . . . simplified.”

Celestron NexStar Evolution Telescope designed by LDA for Celestron; www.LDALLC.com

“Organize your batteries to easily know which ones are ready to use.” eLink designed by Kimi Jensen for SIMPLE MONO SHOP; www.simplemonoshop.com

The submitters pay for the publishing to this unjuried showcase.

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S HO W C ASE

“Ultra-durable scissors designed for professional use that maximize comfort and minimize hand fatigue while bringing a strong aesthetic statement to the toolbox or garage.”

Heavy duty shop scissors designed by Sundberg+Ferar for Wiss; www.sundbergferar.com

“The brains and brawn to deliver an easy user programming interface for off- highway industrial equipment.

”

CCpilotVI designed by DesignThink for maximatecc; www.designthinkstudios.com

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Which schools offer the best industrial design education in 2015?

America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools The only survey of it kind to evaluate the performance of accredited design programs based on the professional preparedness of graduates Inside the updated and expanded 15th edition: • 10 best undergraduate and graduate industrial design schools

2015

• Regional rankings of undergraduate and graduate industrial design schools • Student Surveys: Students rate their satisfaction with their school’s industrial design program • Industrial design programs most admired by academic deans and chairs • Industrial design programs that are best preparing students in design, communication, and other specific skills

-PLUS• Similar rankings and analysis for of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture programs, insightful articles, a directory of leading programs, and much more

Now available in print and PDF instant download at www.di.net/store

www.di.net

ID+ME

MAN & NATURE IN HARMONY

T

here are far too many examples where men or women have defiled nature with their constructs. Earlier this year I spent a month in five different countries. I was most impressed with how Singapore integrates man-made structures with nature. The photos I took reflect the country’s inherent cultural knowledge and execution of building very large structures like the Singapore Gardens (pictured), taking into account the natural settings, preserving the existing environment and shaping those structures to integrate visually and sensually with the surroundings. Singapore itself is a very modern city with many ties to its past history and its specific culture but perhaps today it is more of a melting pot. In many of the photos I took, the modern city is a backdrop for the newer, mostly organic structures that have been created to showcase nature. —George R. Daniels, L/IDSA

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‘So intuitive I got right into it, started creating like I was using my hands.’

Erica Nwankwo, MFA Candidate, Industrial Design

Students and educators get free* access to Autodesk® software including the next generation 3D product design tool, Autodesk® Fusion 360™ www.autodesk.com/education

*Free Autodesk software and/or cloud-based services are subject to acceptance of and compliance with the terms and conditions of the license agreement or terms of service that accompany such software or cloud-based services. Software and cloud-based services provided without charge to Education Community members may be used solely for purposes directly related to learning, teaching, training, and research and development that are part of the instructional functions performed by a primary or secondary educational institution or any degree-granting or certificate-granting institution or any learning, teaching or training facilities. Such software and Cloud-based services shall not be used for commercial, professional or for-profit instructional or any other purposes.

To participate in the Autodesk Education Community, you must agree to and comply with the applicable Terms of Use and also satisfy the following eligibility requirements. You must be one of the following: (a) a faculty member; or (b) a student; or (c) an Autodesk Assistance Program participant.

Autodesk, the Autodesk logo, and Fusion 360 are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product and services offerings, and specifications and pricing at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. © 2014 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.