Interdisciplinarity and the Education of the Design Generalist
Meredith Davis
There is little disagreement that the context for design practice has changed over the last decades and that design education is long overdue for rethinking curricular and pedagogical strategies. The expanding scale of contemporary design problems, quickly evolving technology, increasing participation of users in the design process, and accelerating demands for research call into question the traditional priorities for educating design professionals. What now characterizes work in an environment of complexity, rapid change, and accountability is deep collaboration among people from a variety of disciplines. Problems are too big, too diverse, and too consequential to be solved by individuals or single fields of practice. They require teamwork and many kinds of expertise.
Disciplines have tools, methods, concepts, and theories that provide coherent ways for dealing with problems under an organized worldview. They allow experts to decide what constitutes “good work from bad” within the scope of their domains,1 which are subject to different patterns of growth and changes in perspectives brought about by new knowledge. Experts have deep and sustained experience within a discipline that distinguishes them from novices. Some disciplines remain tightly defined from their origins, while others are open, borrowing freely from other fields and shifting paradigms as the basis for practice.
The terminology that describes disciplines coming together is as varied as the nature of the practice itself. Multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary are often used interchangeably to describe collaborative practices, however, there are variations in their application. In some cases, disciplinary specialists take on individual tasks through a division of problem-solving labor. A social scientist may conduct an ethnographic study of users to inform later work by designers. The study enhances the quality of a solution, but the role of the social scientist is limited to the analytical part of the design process. In other instances, teams work under flat hierarchies with all members contributing equally and simultaneously to the design solution. IDEO’s “Deep Dive”2 features team members forgoing their disciplinary status when redesigning a supermarket shopping cart. Other investigations transfer the methods or theories from one field to problem solving in another, as in the current interest of business in design thinking as a management strategy.
In all of these examples, the intent is to work beyond the traditional boundaries of disciplines on problems that are somewhat ambiguous regarding the skills and knowledge required for their solution. In doing so, it is possible for new fields to emerge that are interdisciplinary from inception or for traditional fields to transform into something that bears little resemblance to their origins.
A Little History on Interdisciplinarity in the Academy
Interdisciplinary aspirations are not new; we can find them in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. On the other hand, how universities organize curricula with the intent of integrating knowledge across disciplines has changed over the centuries. Advances in nineteenth-century knowledge—brought about by the industrial revolution, developments in modern science, and technological innovation—exerted external pressures on colleges and universities to specialize undergraduate education.3 In response, institutions compartmentalized scholarship, transforming a broad liberal arts education into an academic landscape of concentrated majors and departments.4
By the beginning of the twentieth century, academics feared that institutions no longer reflected concern for the education of the whole person and introduced the concept of “general education” as a curricular remedy to perceived over-specialization. Designed to expose students to the foundations of Western thought, the content of general education arose from the humanities and social sciences and often involved reading “great books” that best expressed the values of the educated world.
In the last half of the twentieth century, funding incentives grew for universities to address the practical, project-based interests of government and industry. Multidisciplinary “think tanks” and hyphenated sciences emerged to solve large-scale problems that were not being addressed by traditional areas of scholarship.5 In today’s undergraduate programs, general education and focused study in majors sit side-by-side as an academic compromise in which a well-rounded education and preparation for future employment compete for curricular superiority. Therefore, the growth of interest in interdisciplinarity since the latter half of the twentieth century has both philosophical and practical motives.6
Most communication design programs in the United States entered universities through a variety of contexts during this late twentieth-century progression of interdisciplinary perspectives. Many institutions viewed communication design as a subspecialty of fine art. Although there has been recent migration of communication design programs to schools of architecture, business, and communications, most of today’s programs still reside in art departments and schools.
Interdisciplinary work between communication designers and artists in the 1970s often took the form of artists’ books, exhibition catalogs, and posters. Restricted in their professional practice by geographic location or schedule, many communication design faculty met their scholarly obligations through self-published work and exhibitions, although often outside the established criteria for evaluating fine artists. While for decades this institutional context supported the common concerns of artists and designers for form and the construction of meaning, the practical problem solving of design always created slightly uneasy relationships with fine art. For example, Nina de Angeli Walls’s book on the founding of Moore College of Art in 1848 (Art, Industry, and Women’s Education in Philadelphia) documents early philosophical disagreements between programs in art and design, the latter of which trained middle class women for respectable employment in advertising and the decorative arts. Shared foundation coursework—about which fine art and design faculty must agree—is still the most contested curricular territory in schools of art and design. And although today’s sponsored projects occasionally seek participation of both fine art and design, the more typical model of collaboration with industry favors one or the other and few communication designers would identify the most pressing issues facing their practice as those shared with artists.
A second institutional context, more common in Europe than the US, framed communication design as a skill set within the mother discipline of architecture or within a more general curriculum on design. At NC State University, for example, founding dean and architect Henry Kamphoefner described the future evolution of the college’s modernist design curriculum as a tree with branches in architecture, landscape architecture, and industrial design. He envisioned visual communication as a common skill that cut across the 1948 curriculum, and in fact, the discipline first emerged in the college as a collection of courses in a product design major before becoming its own graphic design degree program in 1990. This perspective shaped interdisciplinary collaboration in many colleges of design and still accounts for architects undertaking signage and exhibition design as extensions of their environmental practices.
In the 1970s, interdisciplinary projects in colleges of design often stratified design responsibility for students from various majors: architecture students designed the buildings; industrial designers designed the furnishings and fixtures; and communication designers handled signage and final presentation boards. Rarely, however, did communication concepts constitute the organizing principles for these projects, nor were collaborations significantly informed by participants from outside the design majors.
Another stream of interdisciplinary activity in the 1970s involved studies of methods and thinking in design. William Pena’s Problem Seeking, Chris Jones’s Design Methods, Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, Don Koberg’s Universal Traveler, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City, Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles, and Charles Owens’s Design Process newsletters focused designers’ attention on analytical strategies that appeared applicable across the design fields. All had their origins in architectural programming and engineering and sought a systematic, “glass box” approach that distinguished design practice from the more intuitive work in fine art. British researchers Nigel Cross, Bruce Archer, and Bryan Lawson developed some of the earliest studies of design thinking, frequently framed in terms of architectural and engineering education. Interdisciplinary projects in colleges of design paid homage to these texts in search of universal strategies for tackling complex problems. And emerging technologies offered the opportunity to computerize aspects of the analytical process for those with sophisticated programming skills.
The expanded formal possibilities of digital typography and an interest in theory swung the interdisciplinary pendulum back toward the humanities and subjectivity in the late 1980s and 1990s. Communication design no longer took its inspiration from art or architecture alone, but sought explanations for the construction of meaning in texts on literary criticism, cultural and social theory, linguistics, philosophy, and media studies. Academic collaborations were often between designers and writers, philosophers, and critics. Faculty encouraged students to pursue elective study in the humanities—especially in courses with a post-modernist perspective—and the work of French philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, were common readings in graduate programs. This approach was also consistent with continuing efforts in the social sciences to create new synthetic perspectives and integrated categories of investigation, such as systems theory, cultural theory, and information theory.
While these theoretical perspectives advanced thinking about the discipline of communication design, many clients for design practice found them less relevant to evolving commercial interests. And the technological shift from replicating craft-based, image-making processes to behavior-driven interactions with users as content producers raised designers’ concerns about knowledge not easily acquired through general studies and the humanities. By the end of the twentieth century, a growing sense of change in the strategic environment for design and incentives for universities to take on technological projects under external funding sent designers and design educators in search of new collaborators.
Communication Design in Today’s Interdisciplinary Context
Media critics David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins describe the earliest phase in the development of any technological medium—before conventions and routines are established—as its most experimental.7 Thorburn also distinguishes earlier technologies from today’s digital media, saying the innovations of the industrial revolution came into being to meet particular needs, while today’s technologies arrive before we know what they are good for. Under these conditions, emergent technologies of the last two decades invited broad participation of experts from a variety of fields as society sorted out what it wanted from the information economy and the expertise necessary to deliver it.
In 1998—when networked communication design addressed mostly buying-and-selling transactions—AIGA organized the Advance for Design to define and build a community of practitioners who would “shape and advocate for the role of design in a world that is increasingly digital.”8 The initiative, under the leadership of Clement Mok and Terry Swack, convened designers, design educators, business executives, software and technology developers, and human factors experts over several summers for discourse about the challenges of advancing the interdisciplinary practice and profession of experience design. The group devoted considerable effort in describing various positions within networked communication practices, identifying the qualifications necessary to staff them, and debating whether the field was another iteration of traditional graphic design or a new evolving practice. At the time, the consensus was that experience design was best left to those with advanced degrees; however, participants did identify curricular principles that would prepare undergraduates to work as members of interdisciplinary design teams:
• Centering student projects around users’ experiences (and the social characteristics of technologically mediated experiences, including conversation, feedback, and negotiation), not around designers’ expressions.
• Considering users’ interactions with designed objects, environments, and services across entire lifecycles.
• Articulating the full ensemble of issues that define project contexts (cognitive, physical, social/cultural, technological, and economic).
• Addressing users’ perceptions of credibility, authority, and reliability; self-determined paths and choices in the navigation of information; and critical thinking.
• Engaging in projects that demand the structuring of content across time and within the affordances of existing and emerging technologies.
• Involving students in projects that require managing complexity, especially those for which there are many possible hierarchies among information components.
• Encouraging students to diagram, model, and simulate relationships among information components before designing communication products.9
Rethinking the potential of the Internet beyond e-commerce now seems prophetic and the partners for collaboration more varied and obvious. The wild and wooly days of figuring out what current work demands appear to be over, if only for the present. Instead, the strategy in business is to assemble an agile and project-appropriate group of experts for the particular experience design task, recognizing that human-centered design is fundamental to any success.
Further, these collaborations no longer place communication design in the service of manufacturing or projects in the built environment. As designer Hugh Dubberly recently commented, “The iPhone is just a hunk of glass in a product design sense.” Its real value resides in the qualities of communication relationships its technological platform establishes between people and people, people and information, and people and the services and activities they see as essential to life in the twenty-first century. These relationships don’t depend on the radius of the device’s corners or Helvetica as its system font, but on the interactions with the world it enables and the match between users’ conceptions of those interactions and how the system actually works. We find ourselves in a world that information architect Adam Greenfield describes as “information processing dissolving into behavior.”10
If a primary goal of education is enduring understanding—that is, knowledge at the heart of a discipline or practice that is likely to remain relevant over a career—it is hard to imagine how the content identified in the Advance for Design will go out of fashion, even with inevitable changes in technology. Yet many college design programs still fail to engage students in deep investigations of users and complex systems that allow them to collaborate with others on core issues of human experience.
What this continuing imperative for deep understanding of people, contexts, and collaborative work signals is renewed interest in preparing well-rounded students who function effectively as members of teams of very diverse experts. Once again, the role of general education is called into question.
For the most part, courses in the liberal arts and sciences are proximate rather than integral to study in design. Design faculty have limited information about what students actually study in a vast array of courses selected from broad lists in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Faculty make little use of concepts or methods from general education coursework in design assignments—other than as topics to “pour” into formats, such as posters, and websites—and rarely challenge the accuracy or perspective of non-design content. Some institutions, especially single-discipline art schools, customize viewpoints on general education to the interests and learning styles of art students; great works, for example, are recast as graphic novels or writing assignments address only issues in the arts. This practice defeats the broadening intent of general education and diminishes students’ understanding of the modes of inquiry used by future collaborators. A frequent complaint by students in these programs, despite lamenting distraction from their visual work, is that faculty underestimate their desire to be conversant with people in other fields.
Therefore, how a college education prepares undergraduate design students for the contemporary world of work involves more than instilling principles of design. Educating design specialists for the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement is an unfinished curricular and pedagogical project that calls for focused attention.
The Education of the Design Generalist
A frequently repeated argument for a general approach to design education—that is, for a lack of specialization in a particular design practice or for some design experience in a liberal arts education—is that today’s students are likely to have as many as seven careers in their lifetimes and that less specialized study will prepare them to move across disciplines as they change employment. However, a search by the Wall Street Journal found no source for these statistics (inaccurately attributed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and reported that most employment changes happen between ages sixteen and twenty-four as young people find their way in the world. The Wall Street Journal also described numbers as skewed by adults who advance in a field to new jobs that meet the technical definition of a career change but are really greater responsibilities in their original disciplines. And the article identified a source of probable distortion as reports that come primarily from career specialists, who deal only with people seeking new jobs. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that job stability, despite an overall downturn in the economy, changed very little in more than a decade.11
What educators really need to understand is how changes in disciplinary direction occur and what underpins achievement when extending work beyond a single discipline. Is it broad understanding built through a sampling of coursework in a variety of fields? Or is it that students learn through a focused major a particular way of seeing the world that makes them valuable outside their original discipline? Or is it that understanding something deeply encourages accomplished people to pursue new interests in an effort to examine what they already know in new contexts? It is probably all of these things and there are individuals whose professional journeys exemplify each way of thinking about education. But the task for colleges and universities is to build curricula around theories of learning and life’s work that signal how best to meet such goals for most students. How do universities prepare people who choose not to live and work within the boundaries of one discipline or field of practice?
A generalist is someone who knows something about a lot of things, whose skills, habits, and interests are unspecialized. The general practitioner in medicine, for example, is not the person who performs brain surgery or treats cancer. Yet there are some very specific things to learn about being a generalist. In the case of medicine, the general practitioner concentrates on wellness as much as illness, on the whole person with careful attention to changes in health across a patient’s lifetime. There is a clear educational path for preparing for general practice, journals, conferences, and continuing education to support this work, procedures for coordinating patient care with specialists, and standards of practice to which the general practitioner is accountable. In other words, the education of a generalist in the profession of medicine is guided by something other than a random collection of courses or completion of only the first years of study required for a specialization in oncology. And there is agreement in the field of medicine that an undergraduate degree is insufficient for general practice, that the characteristic sampling in the sciences found in pre-med curricula does little to qualify someone to treat patients.
Communication design education is not unlike medicine in this respect. And students have options when enrolling in degree programs that do or don’t require an early commitment to specialization. Some schools offer the Bachelor of Arts, a liberal arts degree with some communication design study and a higher percentage of general education courses than found in professional degrees. Other schools offer a BFA in Art, sometimes with Communication Design as an “emphasis” within an array of fine arts courses; the percentage of art and design study exceeds that of the BA degree, but specific coursework in Communication Design may comprise less than 25 percent of the overall curriculum. In recognition that many of these programs have too few credits to develop the full inventory of essential competencies for professional practice, the AIGA and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design designate the BFA with a full major in Communication Design as the “first professional degree.”
Therefore, a student’s choice of degree type, and possibly the institution itself, is the first step to becoming a generalist or a specialist. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of college admissions often fails to make these options clear to students and their parents, with many pre-professional programs claiming to prepare students fully for careers in communication design. And there is frequently a mismatch between what the curricular structure affords and what faculty want to teach, further confusing students about the outcomes of study under various degree profiles. There would be greater clarity for students if degrees that lack sufficient credits for specialization embrace their generalist mission.
In some programs, a general approach to design addresses the institution’s shortfall of faculty resources for providing the depth or breadth required of professional education. In other institutions, general design degree programs sit side-by-side with the professional BFA as an option for students who are not admitted to the specialized degree program through some mid-curriculum portfolio review. And in other examples, the curricular intent is to help students make decisions about future specialization or prepare for careers in which design thinking serves a broader purpose than professional practice in a design discipline.
All of these missions are reasonable and diversify the offerings available to beginning students as they make choices about directions their lives will take. What is of some concern, however, is the lack of deliberate curricular strategies for many of these general programs in design. The dominant models include an undifferentiated cafeteria of offerings or the introductory sequences designed for students who will complete a four-year professional degree program in a specific design discipline. In the first case, students are left to bridge subjects in the absence of overarching themes or courses that contextualize content and perspectives. These students rarely get beyond the most introductory levels of study because the sampled curriculum lacks sufficient credits in any single subject area from which to generalize ideas about the nature of inquiry in a discipline.
Under the second model, in which general degree students take the first courses required of classmates in professional degree programs, the design of any course reflects its position in a much deeper sequence. In other words, faculty assign content to an individual course anticipating concurrent and later study that fully articulates the subject area or practice. For students who take only the first course, or who take it out of sequence, the absence of related courses may distort impressions of what the discipline or segment of practice is about. Students may view typography, for example, only as letterforms and software rather than as shaping reading and language systems.
Design generalists can play an important role in interdisciplinary collaboration: they can expose the limitations of conventional methods and ways of thinking; translate concepts that are otherwise constrained by disciplinary jargon or methods of representation; position strategies within broader contexts than those of the immediate assignment; and identify intellectual resources that may be outside the professional knowledge of specialists. Like the general practitioner in medicine, they can focus on the quality of interactions among members of the team and advocate for the long-term benefits to users. But eighteen- to twenty-year-olds do not acquire such skills and perspective outside a well-crafted curricular plan that targets these competencies as specific learning outcomes. Such a plan must be designed, not left to chance or constructed entirely from bits and pieces of coursework that serve entirely different purposes under the complex canons of discrete disciplines. Scholar James Elkins admonishes visual studies, a corollary to general studies in design, to become “more ambitious about its purview, more demanding in its analysis, and above all more difficult.”12 The same could be said about many general programs in design.
In conclusion, interdisciplinarity appears to be on everyone’s mind, and rightfully so. The influence of communication design as a practice depends, in large part, on demonstrating its contribution to fields that have more secure positions in the information economy and longer histories of scholarship that supports decision-making.
But while everyone is interested in interdisciplinary collaboration among experts in fields beyond design, there is little evidence that schools are inventing, teaching, and evaluating it in rigorous ways. Louis Menand, in his book The Marketplace of Ideas, describes professors in “a real fight, a fight not with each other and our schools . . . but with the forces that make and remake the world most human beings live in.”13 Interdisciplinarity is a struggle to reconcile a system that demands and supports specialization but with a concurrent need for expanded views of problems and their solutions. This is the work of design education for the future.
Notes
1. Klein, J. T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 106.
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dtrkrz0yoU
3. Klein, 21.
4. Menand, L. (2010). The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and resistance in the American university. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 98.
5. Klein, 34.
6. Klein, 42.
7. Thorburn, D. and Jenkins, H. (2003). Rethinking Media Change: The aesthetics of transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 6.
8. Malone, E. (2002). AIGA Experience Design—Past, present, and future. Retrieved from: http://boxesandarrows.com/aiga-experience-design-past-present-and-future/
9. AIGA/NASAD. (2000). Developing Curricula for Experience Design.
10. Greenfield, A. (2006). Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 26.
11. Wall Street Journal. (September 4, 2010). Seven Careers in a Lifetime? Think twice, researchers say. Retrieved from: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704206804575468162805877990
12. Elkins, J. (2003). Visual Studies: A skeptical introduction. New York, NY: Routledge, vii.
13. Menand, 125.