Intro | 2005 National Education Conference Papers

Papers from the 2005 Eastman/IDSA National Education Conference in PDF.

Preface | Papers Index

You can purchase additional copies of the 2005 Proceedings for $50 at LuLu.com @ http://www.lulu.com/content/161112.

Greetings, colleagues, from the far side of the 2005 Eastman IDSA National Education Conference. After spending two and one-half days with design educators in Alexandria, Virginia, one thing is clear: this annual gathering continues to be the best little conference in IDSA. Let me describe for you some of what we discussed, and what this publication, the conference Proceedings, lays before you:

Design practice is evolving from complex to wicked: many and treacherous are the social, political, and cultural intangibles through which a designer must chart in order to advance a vision (Gajendar).

Design is rising to the challenge posed by a world of shrinking resources (Antoniuk), and designing for the Base of the Pyramid--that vast majority of the planet's population that has yet to be served by our profession (Speer).

Design has expanded to include a strategic focus, design of experience, as well as the necessity to interact at the highest levels of commerce and product development to forge directions for the good of society.

Although this is not new--Doblin, Eames, Papanek, and others cut the trailheads for these paths years ago--today the stakes are higher, there is more competition, and the facets to these issues are more complex. Do we have what it takes to be really strategic?

Amazingly enough, we are still arguing questions about form: are form-givers really the second-class citizens of the design world that we make them out to be? In considering this an old-school, almost blue-collar enterprise, we might be ensuring that the mastery of form becomes a dying art. After seventy years of Modernist utility and a comparitively brief time wrestling with expressive form again, we might not be so quick to set it aside. This is not an either-or situation; design is both strategy and tactics, theory and form-giving, the thirty-thousand view and the careful focus on detail. There is room for multiple definitions.

Are we losing the knowledge in our hands, the physical understanding that comes with working with materials in experimental iteration (Anandasivam), in our pursuit of "higher-order" goals? Design education might go down the path trodden by engineering: a narrowing of focus toward the purely theoretical. Will there come a day when we cease to build things? When we stop taking them apart?

One mountain of undeniable height and difficulty sits in our path: that great behemoth, technology--we need to humanize it, to integrate complex interactions with it in a way that is meaningful and worthwhile to the consumer (Budd). Technology has for too long been unleashed into the world without our questioning why, and certainly without much understanding of how to make interaction with it useful and meaningful. It is time for design to stop being solely a conduit from lab bench to store shelf. As set forth in Brown and Duguid's "Social Life of Information," technology is way too important to be left in the hands of technologists.

And how do we equip our students to stand on their hind legs and have confidence in their decision-making process (Glaser), in order to develop the ability to explain and defend their ideas (Kolko). How do we prepare them to, as Bruce Nussbaum put it in his address at this year's IDSA National Conference, "bring design into the top-tier levels of corporate decision making"?

There's a world of opportunity out there. I see leaders and I see strugglers. As we strive to bring up the bottom end, to forge students into tactical practitioners, we must forge and refine what has long been our core competency--far-thinking strategic and synergistic creativity.

I don't know if there are blinding breakthroughs here (actually, if we have been keeping up with what's going on in our profession, there shouldn't be), but I can wholeheartedly agree with conference participant Ann Welsh, Professor of Management at the University of Cincinnati when she says, "I came home with several pages of notes, quotes and suggested readings garnered from the presentations and hallway conversations….[and] at every session I sat through, I learned something." My fellow travelers on this journey we call design, I can be certain that as you read this document, you will feel the same.

Katherine Bennett
IDSA Education Vice President