April 27-28, 1999

The Manufacturing Research Center Auditorium
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332

The goal of this conference is to begin setting a more rigorous framework for studying university level design education, and to identify core areas of an interdisciplinary program in design.

Today, the issues of design education are being re-thought. An older generation of designers are retiring. Corporate memories of good practices are disappearing. The integration of design with new digital media and ways of communicating require re-thinking the practices of design in most fields. Software design is suggesting completely new ways to address design.

Several different directions are being explored. One direction is to expand the use of project courses in engineering, architecture and software development. These range from traditionalist's efforts to re-create the practice project, which is meant to provide a scaffold for discussions of process, values, problem definition and the like. Another use of project courses is to bring students into contact with issues not addressed in highly focused courses, such as ergonomics, system integration, manufacturability and organizational issues. A quite different approach is to define a science of design, based on prescriptive methods. These attempt to formalize different steps and dependencies, in an effort to give students a strong procedural foundation upon which to build up later design experience. Another approach is to re-cast major portions of design into a formal approach relying on new representations. Examples are feature-based design, shape grammars, and the system approaches, such as Bond graphs. These are efforts partially directed toward the development of new formalisms and tools, the other as a way of "thinking about" designing.

In the end, no explicit process can possibly be relied upon to provide the best design, because design is open-ended, is not judged by completely objective measures, and must respond to changing human conditions. Design requires both technical skills and formalisms dealing with "science", and also judgment and insight. How to balance and integrate the two will be an issue we will encounter repeatedly in the next two days.

This first session focuses on experiences that students have as learners of design. As complex cognitive activity, design is not learned overnight but through repeated engagement with design projects. It is a developmental process that needs to be explored with greater rigor. One exploratory tack is to look at the naïve conceptions that design learners bring to the educational process. Another is to investigate the learning trajectory over the course of an undergraduate education. In all tacks, the need to develop assessment tools that illuminate the stages in this developmental process are needed. This papers and discussants will take exploratory steps in these directions.

What makes disciplinary design unique? How do the design practices of an architect differ from those of a software engineer? And yet, how are they the same? What does modeling and representation mean in one community and how does that contrast or compare with another? The papers and discussants will describe and characterize design activity in their fields so as to begin to identify what might be unique and generic in design practice.

Being effective at design seems to involve two kinds of knowledge. One kind of knowledge is domain-related and technical; how does a building stand up? What are the basic components of a compiler or graphics system? What are the procedures in a hospital? How are computer chips fabricated? Another kind of knowledge seems less domain-specific and seems largely procedural. It deals with managing the processes of designing: how to structure and define a problem, how to identify new issues for an already defined problem? how to generate non-obvious alternatives? The second kind of knowledge cannot be easily measured, and the effectiveness of the knowledge interacts with other dimensions of a person, such as personality, social skills and self-discipline. This session is meant to present several different ways of examining design processes.

(statement being prepared)

Designers and their practices have been studied using a variety of frameworks. Some have adopted a cognitive approach that seeks to understand the internal mental representations, strategies and scripts harnessed by designers in their work. Others have argued that design is not so much singular cognitive activity as social activity in which the participants, artifacts and contexts come together to inform and structure design outcomes. Others still focus on the situatedness of design activity whereby meaning and understanding are arrived at minute-by-minute through contingently negotiated actions and interactions. What are the implications of these various frameworks for design learning? And what kinds of change in learner understanding might these stances imply?

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