Key questions:
How do I do interdisciplinary work?
What do I get from it? What’s really hard about it? What are the down sides?
How do I think like an iterdisciplinarian?
How do I use this in my own graphic design practice?
How do I think about creating new knowledge at the intersection of disciplines?
How do I combine two of my totally unrelated passions into something great?
How do I share my stuff with the world?
How do I approach other specialists about working together?
In class collaboration. Students paired up and picked a profession out of a hat. They had to mind map the strengths they held in their profession separately then list the strengths they held together. From there they had to define a collaboration between the two professions, highlighting their combined strengths.
Book that will be out late 2011
I’ve been teaching for the past 5 years, and I’ve always been a bit frustrated that there isn’t a nice, concise book that overviews the mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. For instance, many say that graphic design is visual communication. A cornerstone of communication is storytelling, and yet you’d be hard-pressed to find any discussion of how to tell stories with design in any design book. This should be remedied.
There are new challenges in the world that need to be discussed, and I think design is a prime lens to consider these topics. As our world moves faster and as things become less stable, it becomes more important for individuals to embrace ambiguity, understand paradox, and realize that two things can conflict and still somehow both be true. We must realize that logic doesn’t always work, and that sometimes nonsense is the best answer. These are the topics I intend to address in the book.
The Shape of Design isn’t going to be a text book. The project will be focused on Why instead of How. We have enough How; it’s time for a thoughtful analysis of our practice and its characteristics so we can better practice our craft. After reading the book, I want you to look at what you do in a whole new light. Design is more than working for clients.
This book is about interdisciplinary research on a broader scale. The introduction traces a history of disciplines and follows up by a “defence of interdisciplinarity.” It’s a great read at about 18 pages.
Here’s the pdf of the introduction: joe_moran
Here are my notes in reading this introduction:
11/17/11
Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, Routlege….
STANFORD
interesting problems lie between the disciplines
students don’t come in thinking information is divided, they wonder why we compartmentalize it
building our way into the future
constantly redesigning curriculum
design is not fully realized until it is engaged
problem based learning
if you are not getting in trouble you are not doing anything interesting
make something real happen
what can we do with social media to change things
space creates behavior, allows students to self author
building is thinking
you start with empathy and the direction of the world
BEREKELEY
modular space inspires freedom- fixed, flexible, fluid
collaborative space for faculty to work
ideo rules for diverging
no matter what major you are you respond to good design
when you are highly educated you are stripped of collaboration- students are ready to collaborate
experiential learning
Sara Beckmann
have a purpose room
what is our shared intellectual model? We are all having separate conversations about design and process.
Pact underwear an example of successful collaboration out of Berkeley
teaching to build community, respect and patience
Quotes of interest:
Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. pg 4
The causes underlying the growing interest in design are clear. As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service industry, innovation has become nothing else than a survival strategy. pg 7
The reason for iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process; done right, it will invariably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead. pg 16
Fail early to succeed later. pg 17
Design is now to important to be left to designers. pg 37
The next generation of designers will need to be as comfortable in the boardroom as they are in the studio or the shop, an they will need to begin looking at every problem–from adult illiteracy to global warming–as a design problem. pg 38
us with them. pg 58
…design education draws in equal measure upon art and engineering. The process of the design thinker, rather, looks like a rhythmic exchange between the divergent and convergent phases, with each subsequent iteration less broad and more detailed than the previous one. pg 69
…design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking. pg 85
The skills that make for a great design thinker–the ability to spot patterns in the mess of complex inputs; to synthesize new ideas from fragmented parts; to emphasize with people different from ourselves. pg 86
Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future. pg 149
Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary. pg 237
Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect
This book discusses the generation of new knowledge at the intersection of disciplines.
Here’s some (or all?) of it on a pdf: MediciEffect
I wrote this as we chatted today:
Design is no longer about making an object, but rather a system in which a need occurs and is resolved. Why this now? In a consumer society, we’ve saturated ourselves with products and waste, and yet our needs still persist. We need to redefine who we are and what we need. Choice is not a matter of 30 brands of toothpaste lining up your drugstore shelf. Rather, it’s choosing and controlling life’s milestones: birth, education, family, health and death. Services need to become more human-centered and less profit-oriented. As designers, we have an edge up on balancing diverse viewpoints in a creative process. Let’s share our skills as we embark on a colossal re-envisioning of ourselves and the things we use.
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Brown writes how we need to “extend the perimeter” (205) of the design project, beyond just the making of the artifact, but to the complex system of its use and the need that it fulfills in a broader social spectrum. For example, in the case of the Ararind eye hospital in India, it’s not about the expensive eye lens, but the need of a poor population for care. What this project needed, and got, was an extremely low-cost yet viable solution to the problem.
Ideas in the book, annotated:
Design moving upstream (20)
Project space (35)
Empathy (44)
Wisdom of crowds (58)
Experience design (110, 114)
Storytelling (133, 140 Intel Video, 148)
Interaction design (134)
MBA/design programs (160)
Nurture — medical consultancy (167-9)
Ararind eye hospital, India (209)
Ormondale Elementary (224)
How to, step by step (229)
Met her at the STIR symposium in Columbus, OH on October 8, 2011:
This studio-in-a-school does social design projects worldwide. Natacha Poggio teams up with engineers, scientists, and other experts to find the right way to lead GD students along the path of completion of social design projects. They’ve done a clean water education campaign in India, women’s safety in Kenya, and an MLK mural in Hartford, CO. These are cross-cultural and design-driven — we should interview her!
She spoke about the challenge of doing complex projects like this within a class structure at school. Projects can take up to 3 semesters to complete. Some students participate for one semester only, while others repeat the class just to see the project through to completion.
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WATER FOR INDIA 2009
http://designglobalchange.virb.com/waterforindia
Engineers WIthout Borders student chapter at University of Hartford:
http://www.ewb-hpc.org/india
In January 2009, Hartford Art School Professor Natacha Poggio and a team of five Art & Design students traveled to Abheypur, India to implement the Water for India sanitation campaign.
Water for India aims to convey the importance of cleanliness, sharing, and respect for water resources. During the January 09 trip, the team painted a mural at the girls’ primary school and distributed coloring books with sanitation tips as well as t-shirts with the campaign logo.
This project stemmed from a collaboration with the Engineers without Borders student chapter at the University of Hartford. It is interdisciplinary in it’s foundation. The
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a few thoughts on what is interdisciplinary
In 2011 the boundaries that were once drawn between disciplines are dissolving and deteriorating. This past static perspective is getting turned on it’s head as we face new modes of communication, immigration, and environmental challenges… Within all this change new problems arise. Designers are well positioned as creative problem solvers to face these challenges but they cannot do it alone, collaborative teams of diverse thinkers are often brought together. The borders of the design field have become so far reaching, at what point do you call a project interdisciplinary? What is within and what is outside the borders of graphic design?
>>other areas where borders are dissolving
gender
country borders as people migrate