Teach them to network or be damned
Deborah Littlejohn’s Agenda from Eye 70 focuses on design education
The history of design is replete with narratives exalting the position of the individual ‘creative genius’. The myth of the lone artist who has midnight ‘A-ha!’ moments while working in his atelier is as prevalent in the culture at large as it is in art and design schools. Designers understand the history of their profession, for the most part, through images and narratives of iconic ‘objects and projects’ and the ‘pioneering design heroes’ who create them.
Such scenarios privilege the artefact – and the techno-formal issues in making it – over the contexts in which design is created, disseminated and interpreted within the culture. Yet current research into learning and creativity backs up Henry Jenkins’ argument that this ‘falsifies the actual process by which meaning is generated and new works produced. Most of the classics we teach . . . are themselves the product of appropriation and transformation’ (‘Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century’).
Within most modern graphic design curricula, students still learn their field by understanding its particulars as discrete elements. Graphic Design (1, 2 & 3), Typography (Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced), Identity Design, Packaging Design, Web Design, and Senior Projects are courses labelled to describe designed objects, while ignoring the complex skills necessary for their creation and production and the situated contexts in which they reside. Equally telling, design pedagogy is focused on the individual student, who is identified, praised and graded as being the sole author of his or her own creative production, and therefore typically works in isolation – usually in front of a computer – without much reference, influence or supporting frames of reference.
Such a limited approach not only ignores the day-to-day reality of most design practice – where colleagues, clients, marketers, vendors and various other professionals may also have a say in a design’s development – but is ignorant to the substantial insights gained from recent research into the ways in which people learn through teamwork, inter / cross-disciplinary collaboration, and authentic problems situated in real-world settings that employ technology as a means of connecting with others. And considering the computer as just another production tool can only be to the detriment of design education, because it ignores most of what is happening between people and these networked technologies.
Along with a do-it-yourself Zeitgeist, participatory technologies – such as reputation software, recommender systems, group knowledge repositories, peer-to-peer media sharing, and interactive online games – are changing the way people solve problems, ask questions and work together to create, communicate and learn. Look at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers; Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which allows businesses and developers to post ‘human intelligence tasks’ (hits) and catalyses ‘workers’ to accomplish them; the Google Earth search for the explorer Steve Fossett which had individuals all over the world studying satellite images of the Nevada desert; ‘open innovation’ marketplaces such as InnoCentive and NineSigma, which match problem-solvers with solution-seekers; and non-profit initiatives such as ThinkCycle, which matches the needs of NGOs with design schools around the world.
Online collaborative tools are fostering new literacies and social behaviours. In the near future, students entering design education will be of a generation weaned on multidimensional, interactive and participatory media, with an understanding and expectations of the world that will differ profoundly from that of the generations preceding them. This demographic shift heralds far-reaching, systemic challenges for our educational system (see www.kwfdn.org/map/).
Consider the following statistics from a study of US teenagers by the Pew Internet and American Life Project:
- More than half (64 per cent) of Americans aged 12–17 use online social networking sites.
- 57 per cent of US teens who use the internet create content and share it with their friends online.
- Nearly half (47 per cent) of online teens have posted photos open for viewing by others, and 89 per cent of those say that people comment on them at least ‘some of the time’.
- ‘Super-communicators’, with a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including landline phones, mobile phones, texting, social networking sites, instant messaging and email, represent about 28 per cent of the entire us teen population.
- 81 per cent of teens who access the internet play online games.
These technologies allow students – and laypeople – to participate in the kind of creative work that was once the domain of the fully trained artist, musician, poet, filmmaker, and designer. Such widespread participation demands that designers think of their audiences not simply as consumers and users, but as participants and co-designers. The educational equivalent of this notion also requires educators to think of students differently.
One to one is not enough
The ways students use digital technologies are fundamentally different from how they are taught in the design studio. Implicated herein is the practice of teaching primarily through one-on-one ‘desk crits’ – what design educator Cal Swann derogatorily refers to as the ‘Sitting by Nellie’ approach, which often results in design instructors explaining their personal experiences in order to improve the students’ work.
Conversely, by motivating students as active participants in learning, who construct knowledge collaboratively with their peers – rather than relying upon transmissive teacher-to-student approaches that create what Fischer calls ‘passive, consumer-learners’ – co-operative technologies reduce the focus on isolated learners. Such collaborative practices are not just about learning how to master participatory technologies as a means to personal expression; they should also be understood as social skills that enable engagement within a larger group or community.
The implications of participatory technologies for the practice of design will be long-term, far-reaching and are already being felt – though they are only beginning to be understood. What these developments mean for design education has barely begun to be addressed. ‘The informal participatory communities of fans and gamers are where digital natives already congregate when they seek out knowledge – not the traditional classroom where learning is seen to be static, provisional and bureaucratic,’ Jenkins declares. His cautionary report that schools tend to educate only individual problem-solvers – even though students entering the workplace will be asked to work collaboratively in teams, drawing on different sets of expertise – is as valid to design pedagogy as it is to education in general.
Digital technologies allow anyone with access not only to peer behind the curtain of the mysterious creative process but to experiment with it, and even appropriate the creations of others, first hand. Pierre Lévy’s notion of a problem-solving, democratic ‘collective intelligence’ is already a reality on the Net where most of tomorrow’s designers now engage with creative culture. When this group enters higher education, they will not leave their online communities and collaborative skills at the door.
There will always be a symbiotic relationship between design and the technologies used to support the creation of artefacts. Nevertheless, once connected digital technologies are introduced in the design studio – as they were in the 1990s – a new way of (net‑)working and engaging with design’s communities of practice is possible. Consequently, design education requires a new approach that imparts relevant knowledge and skills in partnership with these technologies – technologies that take advantage of a classroom that exists beyond the academy walls and position the design student as a part of a broader community of learners.
From this perspective, students are not just individualised learners, the computer is not just another production tool, and the classroom studio is not a self-contained entity where students acquire knowledge to be applied later outside in the ‘real world’. This type of connected pedagogy can be envisioned as a part of a wider network of learning, fostering engagement with the field that continues long after students receive their diplomas. The design classroom and its curriculum of projects, critiques and comps still have a crucial role to play in such a context, but they have to be connected with what students already know about in their world.
This article is based on research from the KnowledgeWorks Foundation (kwfdn.org).
Illustration by João Fazenda
February 3rd, 2009 at 10:01 pm | by Teach them to network or be damned | [in plain sight]
[...] them to network or be damned By Michael Turro February 3, 2009 Tags: design, education Teach them to network or be damned - In this article from Eye Magazine (and posted at the Eye blog) Deborah Littlejohn highlights what [...]
February 5th, 2009 at 8:14 pm | by david woodward
I asked a group of 30 first year typography students this week if they’d heard of Twitter - and none had. However, learning design has always been a collaborative experience here at Reading.
If they work, new technologies will get silently adopted. The amount of hype for the latest 2.0 offerings seems to be inversely proportionate to their value. Much of the actual experience is superficial. Do we have time for more on-screen complexity?
February 11th, 2009 at 2:51 pm | by Kenneth FitzGerald
I appreciate this article though I question most of its assertions. Like the comment above, in my experience, we faculty are usually ahead of students on these participatory technologies. And I don’t see how the statistics quoted above translate into the conclusions. Ultimately, the goals urged here aren’t new: collaborative learning and “motivating students as active participants in learning” (that’s too big and controversial a task to just zoom past). At some point, the collaboration must produce something. If you remove the faculty from commenting/evaluating, what do you get?
February 12th, 2009 at 7:15 pm | by Networking article « UCA Maidstone Library & Learning Centre
[...] http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=147 [...]
February 13th, 2009 at 1:23 am | by MLA
‘Overall, only one in three 9-19 year old internet users have been taught how to decide if the information they find online is reliable and can be trusted’
The London School of Economics and Political Science
February 13th, 2009 at 1:27 am | by MLA
‘A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ - youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age - is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.’
The British Library Board
February 13th, 2009 at 1:34 am | by MLA
‘KnowledgeWorks Foundation announced a new collaboration with Curriki. The collaboration aims to further the website’s mission of creating a community for teachers to develop open source learning resources that are free to anyone. To support that goal, KnowledgeWorks has agreed to share expertise it gained from founding Educator’s Knowledge Network, an online professional learning community for teachers involved in its high school reform efforts. The foundation will provide program manager Katherine Prince as an executive-on-loan to work with Curriki half-time through June. Prince, who has specialized in collaborative knowledge management, will help define the role community development and social networking will play as the website matures in providing open education resources.’
February 13th, 2009 at 1:38 am | by MLA
‘KnowledgeWorks Foundation announced a new collaboration with Curriki. The collaboration aims to further the website’s mission of creating a community for teachers to develop open source learning resources that are free to anyone. To support that goal, KnowledgeWorks has agreed to share expertise it gained from founding Educator’s Knowledge Network, an online professional learning community for teachers involved in its high school reform efforts. The foundation will provide program manager Katherine Prince as an executive-on-loan to work with Curriki half-time through June. Prince, who has specialized in collaborative knowledge management, will help define the role community development and social networking will play as the website matures in providing open education resources.’
BusinessWeek
February 13th, 2009 at 1:41 am | by MLA
‘Open edutainment makes the link between teaching, learning and the capitalist culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new private-sector approaches to learning where people create and shape “knowledge” together. These new practices promise to provide students with edutainment materials that are individually tailored to their learning style encouraging the growth of an individualist and consumerist notion of education. There are already over 100,000 such open edutainment resources available on the Internet. Of course, the rich people will still continue to get first class “traditional” education at expensive private schools and Ivy-League universities, these open edutainent resources are meant for the plebs who, let’s face it can’t concentrate for more than five seconds and so find it easier to have their teaching delivered via shoot-em-up video-game, or in super-small bite-sized chunks that don’t challenge them. This also handily makes them into the ideal 21st Century consumers of web-content, downloadable iPod-games and shiny and sparkly facebook applications.’
Stunlaw
February 13th, 2009 at 12:10 pm | by GSA Cross-School Reviews » Eye blog » Teach them to network or be damned Deborah Littlejohn’s Agenda from Eye 70 focuses on design education
[...] opinions rage in the comments section of this Eye [...]
February 13th, 2009 at 12:22 pm | by That’s Edutainment at Visual Communication Blog
[...] opinions rage in the comments section of this Eye article, about the focus of design education in a networked [...]
April 24th, 2009 at 4:17 am | by Deb
thanks Ken for your comments.
The point of the stats in the article is to say that teens are not just passively consuming online media as is commonly implied: they are creating it, mixing it, appropriating it, mashing it, uploading it and sharing it. They are creating their own content. And they’re confronting a degree of complexity in the world (not just the online world, either) that we never imagined when we were kids.
Meanwhile, back in design schools we introduce Freshmen students to design by asking them to move little abstract shapes around in pleasing arrangements with no other assessment criteria other than what makes their teachers smile (as Meredith likes to say)–and, as the Jenks’ article gets at–has no connection to their everyday worlds. If you’re interested, check out the Fischer article I reference as well… the ‘traditional’ mode of education lamented above creates passive consumer-learners. Constructivist pedagogy is not consumerist–and it was originated before the Internet came along.
May 26th, 2009 at 3:55 am | by Jofe
As a solitary genius I find this article hurtful. Naturally for some people collaboration works better than for others. Collaboration is not a good in itself. Design over all will not become better or worse because of the new tendencies described. These technical and social methods will just make life a little bit easier for some people. And a little bit more difficult for others. The debate over collaboration vs. individual genius has more to do with ideology than whether one actually achieves better results than the other. Excellence in results is contingent on other things than sloppily conceived notions of individuality and collaboration. Teach the students something useful.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:15 am | by Jonathan Baldwin
Ah, Jofe - there’s nothing “genius” in that response. Lone, yes. I’ll give you that.
I remember the same argument over computers in the curriculum, Photoshop, QuarkXpress. Indeed I remember my first job interview, being told never to darken the guy’s door again because my Pagemaker skills would never replace cow gum, scalpels and good old-fashioned hand eye coordination.
He said something similar: “Teach the students something useful!” I wonder where he is now?
He’s probably having a moan with the people who told me the web was a fad, that digital photography would never replace film, that people would suffocate if they travelled at more than 30mph and that we wouldn’t have hover cars by 2010 (okay, maybe that last one’s not a good example).
I bet Guttenberg got the same response back in the day. “Moveable type? It’ll never replace a monk in a cell”.
Meanwhile, take a look at this: http://vimeo.com/3363097
May 26th, 2009 at 12:18 pm | by The importance of networking « SLuG’s Blog
[...] SLuG’s Blog BAGC Students telling it like it is « 500 Photoshop brushes The importance of networking May 26, 2009 read all about it in the Eye mag blog here. [...]
July 31st, 2009 at 1:10 am | by Derek Lerner : Blog » “Online collaborative tools are fostering new literacies and social behaviours. In the near future, students entering design education will be of a generation weaned on multidimensional, interactive and participatory media, w
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