Shifting the Pedagogical Paradigm
Leslie Becker
I think we may have finally learned how we learn. Almost twenty years ago we had to confront revolutionary ways to work in our offices because new technologies required that we conflate the production of design with designing. Pedagogical opportunities have been missed because design education (supposedly not constrained by the real world) has not adjusted its teaching and learning methodology to the technologies embraced years ago in practice. This has led to a noticeable disconnect between designing in school and designing in the workplace. Following are the components of a functional pedagogical model:
1. Computers need to be in the classroom.
2. Students need to bring the latest iteration of their work to class, viewable on the screen and as printouts.
3. Design faculty need to sit beside students and suggest, direct, and help them metamorphose projects right on the screen.
They need to think out loud so the students benefit from reasoning and thinking in action, making more explicit the processes that designers use in order to achieve a particular result. “Try making that smaller and redder. . . . Well that didn’t work. . . . Your metaphor escapes me because . . . That fights too much with . . .” By listening to the verbalization of thought, the internal arguments and experience gained from years of practice are made audible, and the student can access both the tacit and explicit knowledge invoked in varying combinations during the course of any project.
Additionally, there is a greater likelihood that students will push a project to a higher level of refinement, because the showing of X one week and then returning to class next week with X bigger and greener, but not Y, simply eats up valuable learning time. Often, students are aware of design mastery and refinement out there in the ether but haven’t yet developed a high level of control over details in their own work. Thinking out loud alongside a student brings forth a “eureka” moment much sooner.
4. Eliminate thrash-around-and-print designing by teaching on the screen and in the moment—a technique that is intended to slow down the design process as it is happening.
Otherwise, students tend to go through rapid successions of ill-considered choices because what they are designing does not exist yet in their heads, making the process more reactive than creative. Design becomes like twenty questions. The student prints some things (or more likely ten things) and brings them to class for review. “That’s not it, not quite right yet . . .” And then we do a little drawing and say, “Why don’t you try this?” Making rapid, ill-considered decisions is (technologically) so damned easy. Perhaps the Ctrl+P command should result in a message on the screen that says “Ponder” rather than “Print.”
The problem with the way most of us have been teaching is that design reasoning, thinking, and decision making are not revealed to the student as these processes are happening. “I would try this because . . . (that’s a better face to use in this situation. It references . . . that color is a bit harsh; it doesn’t speak to the audience you are trying to address. . . .)” This running commentary is a missed, but essential, part of design pedagogy. Thinking out loud represents a moment that brings experience to the forefront. It slows down the reflective process, which, due to technology, has sped up as it collided with and was overtaken by the production process. The comments are heard only after something is printed and shown. Students have already gone away, made questionable design decisions, and committed them to paper. The instructor then offers a critique that they may or may not hear because by now, their guard is up. Isn’t a critique actually just telling someone that something that has sprung from his head is not yet quite right? And we expect students to welcome a critique of their personal expression (which is distinctly unlike arriving at the wrong answer in an algebraic equation)! The problem with the critique is that it requires a suspension of the self. On the other hand, if the faculty member makes sure that students have been brought along inside the process, they tacitly absorb the thinking, reasoning, and intuiting that result in smart design decisions. They are not defending a poor fait accompli.
Eliminating the time-wasting, paper-wasting, back-and-forth shuttling between printing and showing allows students to develop their work, refine it, and embrace the craft of design in a shorter amount of time and with fewer iterations. Many of the complaints among educators about lack of craft would disappear. We have failed to be smart about the barrier-breaking potential of these machines because the paradigm for these technologies that we embraced years ago in our offices has not been applied to our pedagogy. It’s time that we, as educators, caught up with our own past as practitioners.