Intelligent design??

How to Be a Design Academic, by Alethea Blackler and Evonne Miller (Eds.)

ISBN: 978-0-367-36290-4 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-429-35169-3 (ebk) CRC Press, 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Boca Raton, FL, 33487-2742, USA and 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abington, Oxon., OX14 4RN, UK. 328 pp., 2021

Reviewed

by Neil

Mudford

In many ways, this book is a curious production. As its title proclaims, on the face of it, it is a guide to those embarking on, or already pursuing, an academic career in the rather new discipline of Design. Its primary focus is career development and advancement. So, at first, it seems to be narrow in focus and likely to attract a small audience. As I progressed through it though, it became clear that much of the advice it offers applies to most academic careers irrespective of discipline. Hence the potential audience is quite a bit wider than the title would suggest even though, throughout the book, the authors frequently remind the reader that the advice is for Design academics.

Note that I use title case here for ‘Design’ when referring to the discipline or the School, in conformity with the practice of the book’s authors.

In addition to proffering career advice, the book provides an insight into the thoughts and dynamics of a group developing their interrelations in a newly emerging discipline. I suspect that much of what the many authors reveal here applies to other burgeoning and newly forming disciplines. Maybe their intention is to let the reader deduce the applicability to other disciplines and maybe they wish to avoid accusations of straying beyond their own territory?

The book is a compendium of chapters contributed by roughly half of the Design School’s academic staff at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) plus an academic from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. The chapters are arranged in six sections covering starting out, research and teaching plus three sections on leadership –leading yourself, leading others and leading a group or school. To my mind, the idea that academics in a School of Design should think to design their careers and advise others on the same is a natural step to take.

The book also provides a snapshot of the attitudes to and views of academe, career advancement and so on held by a considerable portion of a School of Design in 2021. I doubt that there are many other works where the voices of such a large proportion of a School gather to comment on their School and university environment and that of similar establishments around the country. They provide more than comment/opinion. The works contain results of literature searches and research into the matters at hand and reports of their personal experiences in the profession.

I say that the discipline is newly-emerging but, of course, people have been designing objects and crafting hunting and farming strategies for millennia. That is our species’ particular gift (or curse). Additionally, in the context of academic disciplines as such, Design has long been an integral part of well-established disciplines such as Engineering and Architecture. Then there are industries actively focussed on serial rounds of design such as the clothing fashion industry or the visual attractiveness end of motor vehicle design.

So, what’s new? Well, the book’s authors and their colleagues are envisaging Design around the other way. Instead of beginning from a study of Engineering, say, and developing procedures and processes to design objects in accordance with engineering principles, the new Designers are intent on formulating design generalities and considering where and how these insights can be applied to the design elements of a range of disciplines and in the world at large.

The authors make a strong claim that design is of great benefit to humanity and should be more widely applied in a systematic fashion. They point out that all sorts of systems can benefit from better and more generally applicable design techniques. Some of the systems they point to are human governance systems such as taxation and social services. Looking back over the last few years, with schemes such as Robodebt and the cashless debit card forced upon those receiving social service benefits, you’d have to agree with them – well coordinated design must surely improve matters. In relation to this, the authors are at pains to point out that good design includes careful consideration of the problem or challenge and the needs and nature of the end-users as well as the form and workings of the design ‘product’.

As to the ubiquitous nature of design, when you come to think about it, any creative act is a design exercise. I am here trying to create this book review. Whether or not I am doing this systematically and in accordance with proper design principles, I don’t know; probably not. I have an overall concept in mind, however, and am designing its detail at every turn.

I do wonder how the design-oriented sectors of established disciplines are responding or have responded to innovations, critiques and observations emanating from Design Schools, recognising that the latter are seeking to build an overarching Design philosophy. I suspect the initial attitude from established and well-recognised designer groups, such as engineers, might be that they have it all ‘sorted’ for their purposes – that their approach has developed from longstanding practice, conforms to the guiding principles of their area of endeavour, such as mathematics for engineering, and produces results fit for purpose. The complaint might be that the design principles being propounded are too strongly influenced by features emanating from other antecedents of the new Design discipline.

In one view, such defensive reactions could be characterised as reactionary and closed minded. On the other hand, what is critical academic consideration if it doesn’t include testing, probing and raising objections to new developments plus the important element that separates such testing from mere grumpy opposition, viz. accepting the new thoughts that survive this baptism of fire? If the newly emerging Design Schools can stir up discussion and argumentation along these lines, then I think exciting new developments will emerge.

In contrast to my expectations, Richard Evans, Nick Kelly and Jeremy Kerr in their Chapter 2: ‘Being a Design Academic’, remark several times that the design thinking emanating from Design Schools is now widely accepted and popular with problem solvers. They do not mention any time in which there was resistance to these ideas. If that is so, then the discipline has had a dream run for any new development in thinking, especially where the new development intrudes into areas already populated by other experts, as is the case here.

The book focusses squarely on career advancement and how to grow one’s Design career. I have no doubt that this is will be of great interest and benefit to their potential readership. It tells you how to carve out a niche research area in which you can shine, how to be a leader for those around you and how to ascend through the ranks. As I mentioned above, the book also speaks about the overall aims of the field to unify and systematise design and to thereby improve people’s lives.

What is somewhat puzzling, though, in a book entitled ‘How to Be a Design Academic’ is that it doesn’t say much about how to be a Design academic or what being a Design academic is like. Many authors say they love the field, but I can’t remember anyone saying what it is that they love about it or anything much about the nature of their efforts.

Thea Blackler, in her Chapter 15: ‘Research Leadership’, mentions that one of her research areas is intuitive interaction research. She pioneered this area and is a world authority on it. As I understand it, this field seeks to identify and understand how to design systems, such as machinery or forms to be filled in by a visitor to a website for example, which people can quickly and easily learn to understand or operate. That is, systems that people find ‘intuitive’. I am pretty sure that the photo examination function on my digital camera could have benefitted greatly from her work but, sadly, it is pretty clear that it missed out on this. I would also like to know whether some things are universally ‘intuitive’ for humans or whether, as I suspect, one’s cultural background and past experience strongly influence this, as it does for IQ tests and what people (wrongly) call ‘general knowledge’. If I were starting out to choose an area of academic interest, I think such a titbit could get me interested. Of course, the omission of such descriptions may well be deliberate. The book does seem to be addressed to those already committed to Design. changed over to this option from monograph, and were happy with their final choice.

All chapters present sound advice. They also provide glimpses into the challenges and peculiarities of helping to build a cohesive team in a school whose character and function are still somewhat embryonic compared with disciplines of long standing.

In many emerging disciplines, I expect the feedstock for staff consists mostly of people from established academic disciplines. By contrast, many of those who assembled to form this new Design academic staff body were appointed on the basis of their experience in industry, at least in the early years. This also used to happen in Engineering, for the same sort of reasons – that it is invaluable to have the first-hand knowledge and perspectives of practitioners whose industries are likely destinations for your graduates.

The wide range of staff backgrounds calls on everybody’s patience, empathy and acceptance of diversity to make this team creation work. Then there is the challenge of carving out research and teaching niches within that emerging and developing team and the wider discipline itself. Overall, it seems that everybody initially feels ‘new’ and a tad uncertain about the unfamiliar aspects of their new positions.

This requires many staff to undertake quite a bit of adjustment. Those with backgrounds in design practice and industry find they are called on to write and research in an academic way unfamiliar to them. Those with an academic background are familiar with academe, of course. The novel aspect for these staff is working with colleagues whose strengths and experience lie in designing in the worlds of commerce or public service. The authors here report that there is mutual respect and cooperation between the groups in this Design School’s cohort and that they are learning from each other and even that some staff are migrating across the initial divides within the School into their colleagues’ areas. Evans, Kelly and Kerr deliver an interesting analysis of these latter developments in their Chapter 2, cited above.

The practice of hiring industry practitioners onto the academic staff, though still making a lot of practical sense, has disappeared. The legacy of this practice for Design schools is that there are quite substantial percentages of the academic staff who do not have a PhD. This was the case in my former engineering school and it worked quite well, as I remember. University managements have decided, however, that one of their responses to government demands to demonstrate the staff research capacity is to insist that all academic staff, including existing academic staff, have PhDs. Under ordinary circumstances, the choice to do a PhD is voluntary whereas, now in the higher education system, it seems you do the PhD or risk career degradation.

‘Getting a PhD – “How Hard Can It Be?”’,

In Chapter 5:

Tim Williams and Shannon Satherley explore the labyrinthine effects of this edict across Australian Design schools. Obviously, having to acquire radically new academic skills can be a considerable burden and challenge for staff with practitioner origins, especially while fulfilling the requirements of your existing academic position.

There are even more twists and turns to the tale. For example, the role of supervisor will often fall to one or more of the other Design staff meaning that, simultaneously, the student’s status is equal to that of the supervisor, as a colleague, but is ‘subordinate’ to it as a student. This can be awkward. On top of this, in one instance cited, the supervisor fell somewhat short of providing adequate support to the student because, ironically, the supervisor considered the student to be highly competent and therefore not in need of a great deal of help.

Beyond this feature of university managements’ drive for a tangible qualification acceptable to their government overseers, is the question for the student of how to satisfy the thesis requirement for the award of a PhD. The three options available are by monograph, by publication or by practicebased creative work. As Williams and Satherley report, each has its benefits and drawbacks, mainly centring around the question of the ever-present need to keep publishing to avoid administrative sanctions.

Williams and Satherley discuss the options’ relative benefits/drawbacks in the following terms. The monograph is a coherent work from which publications can be drawn but these are produced after the monograph’s production, creating a publication drought in the meantime. The thesis by publication would therefore seem to be preferable. The drawback there is the problem of working the publications into a coherent whole for submission. Finally, the creative work option would seem, at first glance, to suit many Design staff, it being a creative industry. Interestingly, though, no-one these authors interviewed chose this route. This could be because it would suffer the most from the ‘publication drought’ –no publications on the way through and no publications afterwards. The majority took the ‘by publication’ option, or

Williams and Satherley report a wide variation in the subjects’ overall assessments of the experience, and the benefits or otherwise, of doing a PhD. Some resented having to do it; others enjoyed the experience. Some felt the experience gave them a new perspective and insight on matters and new skills helpful to satisfying their university’s new research demands; others were left unmoved. Some practitioners felt they had done the equivalent of a PhD already in their time in practice but that this experience was undervalued as against the degree. There is an irony for QUT in that last observation. The QUT advertising slogan is ‘The university for the real world’. One wonders who designed that (if it was). Apart from some of the subtle and not-so-subtle inferences beneath the surface of this slogan, particularly in the use of the definite article, one of its plainest meanings must be that its graduates easily and comfortably find their place in the world of work. This seems at odds with assigning a low value to practice in hiring academic staff.

The high workloads of academics at all stages in their careers is an important consideration for anyone embarking on an academic career. This topic is discussed widely and at length, particularly in Marianella Chamorro-Koc and Glenda Amayo Caldwell’s Chapter 11: ‘Running the Academic Marathon – Planning and Executing as Planned.’

Across the whole higher education industry, academics find that they have to devote immense amounts of time to their work. These authors point to the mental health implications of the long hours worked and the toll this takes on the nonwork aspects of academics’ lives. Evonne Miller in Chapter10: ‘How to “Dare Greatly” in Academia’ cites a study that concluded that 43 per cent of British academics surveyed exhibited symptoms of at least mild mental disorder. No-one presents any definitive solution to the workloads problem. Chamorro-Koc and Caldwell offer a range of strategies to help alleviate the problem such as keeping a calendar, getting better at multi-tasking and so on. These strategies are all worth pursuing because each is a worthwhile salve for the problem, but can they really compensate for the high pace and volume of the work? I am pretty sure the answer is ‘No’. There is surely a limit to what can be achieved and accomplished, no matter how slick one becomes at achieving and accomplishing. A significant danger in tackling the problem with clever ways of doing more and more and suggesting that others do the same, is that, when the demands remain overwhelming, the sufferer can mistakenly blame themselves for failing to do everything demanded of them.

Quite rightly, the authors addressing these problems emphasise that you have to make time for yourself; wearing the ‘Me’ hat as one strategy in Chapter 11 puts it. Of course, this hat is also the ‘Family and Friends’ hat. The people around you suffer if you are going spare trying to keep up. As I see it, if you have to deliberately and officially carve out a recreational space in your busy schedule then you are still in deep trouble. There is also the question of time for quiet contemplation which, for me, is where ideas well up. This can’t be slotted into the half hour between your lecture and your meeting with your colleague the PhD student.

Overwork is not confined to universities, of course. Workers in many industries are similarly afflicted. School teachers, for example, are also suffering and, as a result, so many are leaving the profession that Australian schools are struggling to provide all classes with teachers at all times. Thus, academics’ overloaded working lives do not stand out as starkly against a background of human-friendly workloads as they would have done in the days of working 9 to 5. Though the 8 hour day came in for a bit of ribbing about the arbitrariness of knocking off at the appointed hour, it now seems a paradise compared with working during the day then at night and on the weekends as well. Longish hours for academics have probably always been the case but, in the past I believe it was done voluntarily, more often than now, out of interest in your research or teaching. Now the extra hours are needed just to scrape a satisfactory mark from the management masters.

Winning the 8 hour day was one of the great triumphs of the union movement. I note that there is not a whisper of the union in the book. Everyone wants the workloads to ease off to a dull roar, but no-one suggests that collective action and supporting the union is one way to help achieve this end. I count this as another instance of a general tendency in the book to accept the current state of the work environment as immutable and to conclude that we all just have to get on and cope somehow.

In the same vein, while casualisation is rife in the university system and constitutes quite a major barrier to a sustained career, there is no mention of the phenomenon in the book. A survey of the School’s list of academic staff on the QUT website shows only 2 out of 40 being identified as ‘casual’ which must rank with the best ratios of indefinite to casual appointments for any discipline across the country. It could be that the Design School is a burgeoning new area for the university and, as such, may be shielded somewhat from casualisation. On the other hand, maybe this is proof positive that the book’s advice on career progression, coupled with a Designer’s skills, is a powerful force for advancement!

In total, the book is a welcome and valuable addition to the literature providing help for academics in their career development as well as providing us with an insight into current university academic staff attitudes and challenges for a goodly proportion of a School’s academic staff.

Contact: neil.mudford@bigpond.com