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A Different Model for Design Education

By Sherin Wing

Thursday, March 14, 2013 9:33 am

Agility and adaptation are central to any professional field.

Those about to enter a profession must learn practical and intellectual skills. But the days when

specialized and narrowly defined skill-sets guaranteed a steady and reliable living are gone.

Todays practical skills need to be accompanied by rigorous and critical modes of thinking.

One case in point is the graduate program at Art Center College of Designs Media Design Practices

(MDP). In conjunction with the schools initiative, Designmatters, which provides a blueprint for

design education, the Field track of MDP provides students with a unique foundation of theory and

on-the-ground training. Faculty member Sean Donahue describes the program as structured

around Investigation and interventionhow designing can be an inquiry and mode of knowledge

production to inform other disciplines and issues in a unique way. Also, how can these be

combined with work being done in areas of good and social impact?

Proposals for collective farming models for women, image via mediadesignpractices/judytoretti

/Six-Weeks-in-Uganda

While activist design has been around for years, the Art Center model unites critical analysis with

design skills. The goal is to provide useful solutions for people locally and abroad without being

culturally reductive or condescending. Too often, designers try to reinvent social intervention in

their haste to be in the vanguard of a new approach and school-based design projects. These can

be equally misguided. The result can waste material resources, human capital and money, while

reinforcing cultural assumptions about the other. This is especially true of built interventions.

These can be unnecessary, unusable, and often are left to decay. Wasted resources and human

effort that fail to correct culturally essentializing narratives have been well documented in

ecotourism andvoluntourism. These consumer-based activities exemplify the perils of modern

cultural colonialism. And while there are many defenders of the good they do, the fact remains

that they, educational institutions, and even NGOs like Oxfam struggle with their long histories of

colonialism hidden yet still entrenched in many current activities.

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Organization chart displaying the roles and structure of the [anti-NGO] NGO, image via

mediadesignpractices/filter/field/mlamadrid/Planification-and-Self-Evaluation-Guide-

for-Social-no-empowerment

To avoid producing solutions based on invalid, often fantastical cultural projections, proposals

must be rooted in a deep understanding of the culture, people, economy, and politics of the places

chosen for intervention. This is, after all, an intervention. The key, according to Donahue, is to

start not with what has been created by others to solve problems but instead start with the

realities of lived life. This more holistic and community-led approach develops an understanding

of the conditions as they are nownot as they were 50 or even 20 years ago. These social

conditions are a set of ongoing and changing situations that are embedded in social contexts.

The hope is that Art Centers MDP Field Track model will influence other design programs.

Anchored by three core faculty members, the program has an anthropologist, professor Elizabeth

Chin; and two design faculty members, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Donahue who provide a design

perspective. Together, the team creates an educational framework that allows students to explore

intelligent interventions. Whats more, these interventions are proposed within existing structures

such as UNICEF. The results are intellectually rooted, design-oriented solutions spanning a range

of class, economic, and political issues.

Diagram of factors involved in food production/consumption, image via

mediadesignpractices/filter/field/betsykalven/Reductive-Food

The students, guided by professor Chin, establish a solid intellectual foundation by exploring

ethnography, ethics, social history, as well as develop research competencies. This type of

approach is not often embraced by designers, as Chin says, Thinking through making immerses

students in works about ethnography, colonialism, and post colonialism. They also delve into

political economy, feminism, structuralism, post structuralism, and other theoretical

perspectives. This, in addition to exploring related social theory, design projects, research studies

from a variety of disciplines, and the development of students own arguments and points of view,

she adds,Key to this approach is taking the time to immerse ourselves in the culture and context

as much as possible, rather than coming in with an idea of what needs to be done.

After this immersion comes the first six-week trip. When they return to the states, the students

develop their proposals. Then they return to the site for another three-to-five weeks to present

their proposals to the community. The program is structured for inherent flexibility: students

explore their own interests within a larger discursive field but that are contained by the projects

parameters.

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Diagram, land ownership, image via mediadesignpractices/filter/field/mlamadrid/Balloon-

Mapping

This years program is working with UNICEF in Kampala, Uganda. This is not intervention by

helicopter in which students drop in, make some arbitrary innovations, document them for

their blogs, and then leave. Nor is this styled as a work-for-hire mediation. Instead, MDP Field

track requires more than one trip to the community site. As Donahue explains, Students work

with groups supported by the UNICEF country office. Equally important is that they work directly

with CBOs [Community Based Organizations] groups and families outside of UNICEF. Our

students find that even though our partners mission may be about supporting children,

addressing and providing that support requires engaging a range of actors from grandparents to

teachers to local council members.

The program provides a useful model for other design programs, whether they are associated with

academic or other NGOs and charity organizations. It offers an example of how to begin a

productive exchange with communities who need help without replicating cultural colonialism,

either intellectually or in practical interventions.

Surely the time has come for restructuring the way we engage each other and divesting ourselves of

the condescension that has for too long dominated our interaction with people less materially

fortunate than ourselves.

Sherin Wingwrites on social issues as well as topics in architecture, urbanism, and design. She

is a frequent contributor to ArchDaily, Architect Magazine and other publications. She is also

co-author of The Real Architects Handbook. She received her PhD from UCLA. Follow Sherin on

Twitter at@SherinWing

Categories: Design, Education, Social Sustainability, Socially Conscious

Tags: Art Center College of Design, Designmatters, Media Design Practices, UNICEF


a different model for design education

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