Design is … Lost

Where are today’s design schools and design researchers? In my experience, most design teaching is feeding the machine – sticking to the outdated playbook of modernism, training students in skills for industry now rather than preparing them to contribute thoughtfully to a less materialistic future. With some notable exceptions, there are relatively few schools where sustainable design is core to the curriculum; if included at all, sustainability is merely an afterthought, bolted onto the side of a pre-existing set of courses that serve to maintain the status quo. And where is design research? The phrase ‘rearranging the deck chairs’ comes to mind. Having served for many years on the editorial boards of The Design Journal and similar academic publications, I have a reasonable grasp of the kinds of design research being done internationally. In my view, too much of it is uninspiring and woefully ignorant of the most pressing issues facing us today. Perhaps because design research is still relatively young, it has yet to demonstrate confidence in adopting its own discipline-appropriate methods. Instead, it frequently falls into the trap of mimicking scientific or semi-scientific methods whereby a question or hypothesis is posed, objectives set forth, data gathered and analysed, and conclusions drawn, which may then lead to recommendations, guidelines, a set of tools or some other supposedly practical contribution that other researchers and the profession are virtually guaranteed to ignore. Indeed, I have engaged in this kind of work myself, for the truth is that researchers often have little choice because these are precisely the expectations of the funding councils, the criteria for which were developed out of the sciences and engineering. This kind of stuff is churned out incessantly, filling reams of online and in-print journals, which have proliferated in recent times to fill the growing demands of universities. What is all this for? It is certainly not rising to the major challenge of our time, nor is it constructively advancing design practice. It is missing the mark