Dismantling Misperceptions on Design Education in the Academy:

2015

The design disciplines and design education with academia have been culpable  - over the past decades – in creating and maintaining a number of misperceptions regarding both the position and status of design education within the university context.  These historical misperceptions or false shibboleths are a consequence of the design discipline’s portrayal of itself and its pedagogic models as anomalous to university norms.  The result of this is that design education and programs now occupy a relatively peripheral status on campus and are poorly understood within the academic culture across many universities.  Far too often we have heard design administrators make the argument that what we do in design schools is different from what happens in the rest of the university.  For far too long we have stressed how our discipline is distinct from the sciences and from the humanities and more like law and medicine’s disassociation from university norms.  This has not served us well.    

It is self evident that these self-created characterizations and the accompanying self-inflicted marginalization have been injurious to design education and to our standing within the academy.  Design programs and leaders of design programs must work towards dismantling these false shibboleths.  Instead of continuing to do our work on the margins, we must relocate our disciplines and the pursuit of design knowledge to the very nexus of the academic endeavor.  To do this is simply to return to the humanist idea that architecture and the allied arts are the bridge between the sciences and the humanities.  The following outlines a course of action towards that goal.  

Shibboleth 1:   Architecture and Design programs are anomalous and peripheral to a university’s core teaching mission.

Response: The dean of a college of architecture and environmental design must advance the argument that design education is both central and necessary to a university’s principle mission of creating broadly educated humanist-citizens.  The more that our university students – be they design students or non-design students - are exposed to architecture and the cultural arts as part of their general education, the better able the university will be to inculcate an appreciation for design as an important component of how we construct culture.  Professional design programs – within a university context - can thus be understood as both narrow disciplinary specific programs that serve a small group of students and as a critical participant in the liberal humanist education that serve a very large group of a university’s students.  Deans must do a better job nationally of ensuring that architecture and environmental design programs are correctly perceived as being central to the core values, missions and visions of their respective universities. The humanities and the sciences must be more fully engaged.  Design should be a component of the university core curriculum. Design as a commodity is ubiquitous and highly valorized in our twenty first century culture, but design discourse is practically absent as a subject or topic in most university core curricula.  Deans must correct this by arguing for “design thinking” and design discourse to become a central aspect of general education at our twenty first century universities.   

 Many universities are just now recognizing that the teaching and curricular models that have been the basis of design education are in fact applicable and successful across campus. Didactic and pedagogical approaches such as the case study and precedent analysis method have emerged as the best models for rethinking curricular delivery, for hybridized and trans-disciplinary curricula and for what the Carnegie Foundation calls a fully engaged teaching context.  These teaching models break down silos, promote seamlessness and hybridity and valorize trans-disciplinary work both within the university and through extra-university partnerships. Design schools have been quietly doing this for decades! 

Shibboleth 2: Architectural and design programs aren’t profitable, and are often expensive “boutique programs” for a university to maintain. Unlike engineering and business schools they show low returns on investment and do not participate in adding significant “value” to the university or to economy. 

 Response: A dean of a college of architecture and environmental design must consistently make the case that while the student to faculty ratios in design and creative arts programs are often on the low end of the spectrum when compared across a university, other factors more than mitigate this metric.  Both the Delaware and Oklahoma Studies on comparative faculty salaries consistently reveal that personnel costs are significantly low when compared across departments and colleges, particularly when compared to other professional schools such as law, medicine, engineering and the STEM programs.  Additionally, student contact hours and fundable student credit hour generation per fulltime faculty in design programs are typically among the highest in a university.  Finally start-up costs and space usage costs are comparatively extremely low. An entrepreneurial dean will rely upon sound analysis to locate, support and promote broad program efficiencies in order to offset and maintain tactical inefficiencies so as to better serve the interests of a program’s students and faculty.  

Finally, the design and creative arts industries employ well over six million people and contribute roughly 160 billion dollars per year to the US economy (excluding construction).  When one adds the construction sector and its 6 million jobs, a college of architecture and environmental design has a strong argument to make for the valorization of design, creativity and construction as critical economic engines for the state, the region and the nation.  Nationally, deans must do a better job telling this story individually and collectively.

Shibboleth 3: The “studio” teaching model is an obsolete curricular model that is peculiar to the design disciplines and limited in its applicability across the university.

 Response:  Many of our studio based didactic models are being adopted and applied across our campuses. “Design thinking”, “case-study learning”, collaborative project based learning, trans-disciplinarity, community engagement and service learning have all been central to our studio teaching model for decades. Architecture and environmental design programs typically have the highest admissions standards, highest retention and graduation rates and the highest student satisfaction rates when compared across a university.  Much of the success is a direct result of the studio-based, Socratic teaching model that is central to how we educate. Business schools were the first to adopt it from us and we are now seeing it applied widely across campuses in numerous degree programs.