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Design, and design education: How can they get together?

Article  in  Art Design & Communication in Higher Education · April 2017

DOI: 10.1386/adch.16.1.125_1

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Published in Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, 16/1, pp. 125-131, 2017
Jorge Frascara
Design, and design education: how can they get together?

How can I describe design?

Design is about people, it helps transform their existing situations into better ones (Simon 1981,
p. 129). This is the most important function of design. To live up to this, designers need
motivation and knowledge. Motivation can be developed through education, knowledge through
instruction. Motivation makes us want to do things, knowledge gives us the tools to do them.
(The crafting of design products that has prevailed in design education till this day, is not the final
goal of design, it is the medium, the skill used to build the tools that help realize design's final
goal).

Designers need to learn about people’s needs and wishes, feelings, expectations, possibilities and
limitations, preferences and behaviours, and understand them in their contexts. This is why design
has to be user-centred. (I say user-centred and not human-centred because “human” is what all of
us are, but in connection with design, we are users, engaged in interaction with design creations).

User-centred design is a principle, not a method. If the design process does not involve the user,
the user will not get involved with the design product. Terms do not matter that much, what
matters is the substance of actions. A term like ‘Participatory design’ is no better than user-
centred design; ‘co-creation’ is no better than participatory design. User-centred design sets the
frame. It puts the user at the center: not the maker, the client, or the last fashionable style.

Adhesion to user-centred design implies the need to know how to learn about the user. This
requires design research methods: participatory design, co-creation, interviews, focus groups,
ethnographic observations, shadowing, surveys, literature review, iterative designing and
evaluating… These and others are ways to get to know the users, but what is needed to begin with
is empathy (another framing principle that involves motivation and values, not instruction).

When design is conceived as a way to tackle complex problems in society (all problems involving
people are complex), it becomes necessary to resort to evidence-based design. This means trying
to make every important decision on the basis of proven success, primarily consulting published
research, case studies and the experience of trustworthy colleagues, and normally complementing
this with field research to create new and much needed information about the specifics of issue at
stake. Most design problems relate to unique situations, and require information that is not
published. Contexts, contents, users and purposes rarely repeat themselves exactly from project to
project. Evidence emerging from published research must be context-tested. In text
comprehension, for instance, the question is not whether bullet points are better than narrative
prose; the question is when is one strategy better than the other. The reply can only be crafted
considering purposes, contexts, users and situations of use.

Design is oriented to action and to the future: it intervenes in reality to change it for the better.
The origin of a project is the identification of a need and the definition of objectives to be
achieved. This is why design is outcomes-oriented. The outcomes are not the products created,
but something that happens once the design intervention has taken place, and changes have
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happened because of the intervention. In project development, the desired outcome should shed
light back onto the design process and define it. Each step should be evaluated as to whether it is
aiming or not for the outcome sought after. The steps to take are to be guided by performance
specifications. For example, if we want our design of a text to achieve high comprehension, what
should it do? 1) The text should facilitate legibility (perceptual need), this means: a) it should
have the size required for comfortable reading at the distance determined by the reading situation;
b) it should be composed in a font that guarantees discriminability of letters and considers the
resolution power of the eye to identify details and differences between letters. 2) The text should
facilitate comprehension: a) it should use a vocabulary familiar to the readers; b) it should explain
terms and acronyms that might not be familiar; c) the information should be clearly chunked in
units of meaning to facilitate comprehension… and other specifications of performance that will
constitute a check-list to confirm that design decisions help achieve the final objective of high
comprehensibility of a text.

There is an overarching indispensable principle to ensure that design makes sense: it should be
socially responsible. This is an inclusive term. If design is socially responsible then it will be
environmentally responsible and ethically responsible.

Design fundamentals
The fundamentals of design are purpose, planning, efficiency, accountability, order, knowledge of people
as design users, as well as sensitivity to content, context and sub-cultures. Designing presupposes
knowledge of production technologies, of design and research methods, of how to see and evaluate
products and systems, and how to identify problems and opportunities for design interventions.
Efficiency and clarity are central to design, but also joy and wit.

All the above are the fundamentals of design, not the visual elements, despite the fact that so
many design schools focus their first year on them, following the Bauhaus tradition created
almost 100 years ago. They are important, but are only the physical part of design.

Educating designers for reality and in reality

Design education must consider all the above discussion, and help students develop the necessary
competences, not just visual competence.

Instruction and education are different and complementary. To instruct is to train. To educate is to foster
the development of independent judgement and the adoption of values. A good designer has to be both
instructed and educated to become a good member of society.

The task of a teacher is to help the students learn, not to just deliver lessons. Thus, the teaching
task becomes more difficult, and substantially more interesting, because it positions the problem
addressed in a point of tension between the subject of study and the student, not between the
subject of study and the teacher.

Ideas are important in design, but ideas don’t come from magic inspiration: they are possible
when knowledge of a problem exceeds common knowledge. To achieve this, design education
must involve an introduction to research (Research is not open exploration: doodling with the
pencil or surfing the net in search for different design options is not research). Research should
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be taught so that it assists the design process of the students at the moment of conception, during
design development, and as a tool to evaluate design performance. Evaluation is indispensable, it
allows designers to assess their assumptions and the quality of the products, and engage in
continuing improvements. When design is oriented at fostering change to improve a given
situation, and when the situation is real and can be observed and evaluated before and after the
design intervention, then the quality of the work can be assessed.

Quality in design is based on performance, on the degree to which objectives are met. This is
sadly missing in design education in general. My best experiences as a professional come from
measuring the performance of what I design. An 11.9% reduction in antibiotics prescription as a
consequence of a campaign that my wife (Dr. Guillermina Noël) and I designed in Italy, as
opposed to 7.4% in the control group, confirms the quality of the approach taken (Formoso et al
2013). The 19% reduction of fatalities in traffic collisions achieved in Alberta in the early 2000s
following a campaign to which I contributed is another example (Taylor 2003, and McDermid,
2004, p. 6). Increasing the ability of people to remember the content of documents, shortening the
time they take to find specific items in large documents (Frascara & Ruecker 2007), reducing the
number of questions people ask to find their way in a complex building, reducing errors in
hospitals... are all results of high quality design work.

Successful outcomes require user studies. User studies require assessment of the situation of use,
the purpose of the design, and the various contexts that surround the interaction of people with
communications, objects, and services. This links design with the social sciences, since design is
about people. People are diverse: it is a challenge to reach them all in any project. Public health
campaigns must bear that in mind: intellectuals and semi-illiterates, old and young, wealthy and
poor, all must be reached. As much as the public is varied, strategies must also be. The
paradigmatic representative of a group does not exist. Classes of people are full of variations,
even among groups like students in a design class. They are all in the same institution, they often
study the same type of subjects, but they are substantially diverse. Design education is
excessively dedicated to formal training and a romantic notion of creativity, as if high quality
solutions depended on the intuitions of the designer. Students in design must be conscious of the
need to be accountable for results, and the way to form them in this is by engaging them in
projects that are real, and that can be evaluated. We are otherwise forming handicapped
professionals that believe the job is complete when they hand-in the designs to the client.

Sophistication in thinking and making are basic design requirements. These involve: ability to observe,
analyse and evaluate products and situations; systematic ways of working; sensitivity for the needs and wishes
of people; attention to detail; ability to collect and organize information; and ability to describe problems,
projects and proposals concisely and with precision. Design also requires ability to understand the contexts of
intervention, and to balance different demands, conceiving solutions as integrating apparently disparate
requirements. Design has to avoid false dichotomies, such as “what is more important, aesthetics or function?”
Both, without a doubt: aesthetics is a functional consideration. Along with visual sophistication and sensitivity
for materials, these skills can be developed through practical projects, reflection, readings, discussions, and
continuing professional development.

Thinking and making are fed by observation, analysis and criticism. A way to develop these is
to carry a notebook to collect thoughts, quotations, notes, sketches, observations and captioned
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images, all dealing with design or with related issues. Particularly taking note of design products
and situations, good and bad, and describing why either. This is continuing education at its best:
designers have to learn how to learn. This requires being constantly alert, observing and
evaluating. I am not referring here to sketchbooks, where artists doodle visual ideas, but to
notebooks, for articulated reflections about the world around.

Visual and verbal language

Exclusive concentration on ‘the look of things’ is long passed, but design programs usually
disregard the language of words, that actually dominate communications. In my experience,
working on a wide variety of information design projects, language takes about three quarters of
my time. Texts written by content experts normally disregard the lack of familiarity readers have
with the content. Content experts pay exclusive attention to what they want to say, and little to
what their readers need to understand and how they need to understand it. Design schools in
general fall short of preparing students for language management. As an information designer I
have to know the purpose of the text I am supposed to work with, so that I can assess the writing:
is it meant to inform, to summarize, to analyze, to propose, to justify, to explain, to persuade, to
entertain or to amuse?

Teamwork and the interdisciplinary nature of design

The act of designing always involves people beyond the designer: clients, users, experts from
other disciplines, and researchers. A designer must be educated in teamwork, and in the skill to
speak different disciplinary languages. Design is not art, nor solitary activity. Teamwork involves
recognizing clients and users as partners in the design process. One does not work for them, one
works with them. This is not normally the mindset of students when they arrive at a program.
Their image of the future is to become successful making a good living in a “creative” profession.
In design, creativity requires knowledge, deep knowledge about the whole set of problems that
are embedded in most projects. Creativity has to be context-relevant: it does not emerge from
“inside the designer” but in the connection between the designer and the issue at hand, with all its
implications.

Problem-based learning
Pedagogy in medicine has recently discovered the value of problem-based learning. Leading
educational institutions have adopted it as a way to introduce students into the realities of human
health. The organs or illnesses of a person are not separated entities. A person is an integrated
system of systems and, to make things more complex, is affected by various contexts. Design
education has always been organized as problem-based learning, embedded in projects. We tend
to teach through projects, rather than through isolated variables, exercises or subjects. However,
how extensive is the usual number of issues that come to play in a design project in school? Are
many variables considered? Or is the “problem” normally reduced to “designing an original logo
to represent an imaginary organization”, or “a book for kids aged 9 to 10?” What kind of kids are
we talking about? What purpose does the book have? Is it to teach or to entertain? How to
achieve the purpose of the book? Do users take part in the design process? Are clients real, with
their personal views and requirements, their internal politics, their visual preferences, budget
constraints, and value systems? Reality is complex and designers cannot be formed in falsely
simple environments. The task of the educator is not to simplify complexity, but to help
addressing it.
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Occasional teaching in real projects is indispensable for the students to access all levels of
learning. There are three kinds of knowledge: explicit knowledge, that can be communicated
easily in lectures and writings; implicit knowledge, that is not normally articulated but that can be
articulated at will; and tacit knowledge, that can only be observed in action when working with a
skilful expert. Actions are full of information that is so detailed and extensive that resists
articulation and transmission through language. This is why it is so important to introduce
students into the complexity and ever surprising character of reality, away from super-controlled
classrooms.

Design needs theory, but it cannot be taught on the basis of only theory. Real learning has to be
grounded on experience. Generalizations are essential, so that the learner can transfer knowledge
from one context to another, but they cannot be too abstract, so that learners can connect new
information with their existing experience and adapt it to face to new challenges.

Summing up: integrating design education within a university

What does design education need to do to catch up with best practices in design?
The practice of design always has to face the need to understand users, clients and project
development partners. This is why in the mid ‘90s I created a new program at the University of
Alberta. Working with the Department Chair, Desmond Rochfort, and the Administrator, Stan
Szynkowski, we planned and implemented the Bachelor of Design with Pathways, establishing
agreements with Business, Computing Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences and Printmaking to
allow design students to take up to 45 % of their program in one of the selected disciplines.

Of those disciplines above, I see social sciences as an inseparable part of design. Without social
sciences design is a joke. Designers work with people and for people. People are very complex
and interesting, far more than forms, shapes, lines, textures, materials, volumes, colors,
technologies and animations. Unfortunately studies of people are normally missing from design
education. However, they are our reality, our challenge, our objective, and our reason to exist.

Teaching an accountable practice of design

The intention to include the study of users in the curricula needs to go along with a thorough
command of research and design methods, tools that allow designers to implement that intention.
Interdisciplinary programs are necessary, but not sufficient, and they require disciplinary
expertise. If design is to develop its full potential as a major contributor to society’s wellbeing,
design education has to change into a rigorous, interdisciplinary, and socially responsible activity.

References
McDermid, D (Ed.), 2004, 'Saving Lives on Alberta's Roads: Report and recommendations for a
traffic Collision fatality and injury reduction strategy', Alberta Transportation internal report.

Formoso, G, Paltrinieri, B, Marata, AM, Gagliotti, C, Pan, A, Moro, ML, Capelli, O & Magrini N
2013, 'Feasibility and effectiveness of a low cost campaign on antibiotic prescribing in Italy:
community level, controlled, non-randomised trial', BMJ; 347:f5391 doi: 10.1136/bmj.f5391

Frascara, J & Ruecker, S 2007, 'Medical Communications and Information Design', Information
Design Journal, vol. 15 no. 1, pp. 44-63.
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Simon, H 1969-1981, The sciences of the artificial, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Taylor, R, Vice President Alberta Motor Association, and Coordinator, Mission Possible,
Alberta Traffoc Safety Coalition. Personal communication.

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