How Do You Teach Design for Tomorrow?

Jarrett Fuller:

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. My name is Jarrett Fuller and I’m your guest host for With Intent’s, second season. This season, I’m turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators, and design students today.

Today we’re asking the big question, what does it mean to teach design today? What do today’s design students need to know to practice design? What does the future of design look like and what is the value of a design education and its role in the industry?

For this episode, I’m joined by two people who have thought a lot about these questions and we have a fascinating, inspiring, and ultimately optimistic conversation about why studying design is so exciting right now. Matt Mayfield is the Associate Dean of Academics and Administration at ID, a position he’s held since 2017, after joining ID in 2001. He leads all the curriculum development with the full-time faculty and has developed courses at ID in product and portfolio planning, contextual research design, and computer aided design processes.

Zach Pino is an Assistant Professor of Design and serves as ID’s lead digital tools instructor and digital product facilitator. His work centers around how contemporary objects can embed data in their fabrication, functionality, and form.

Together the three of us talk about how to think about design education today and look towards the future of this ever-changing practice. I hope you enjoy it.

Matt and Zach, welcome to the show. Today we’re talking about what it means to teach design today. I want to start, Matt, with a sort of big question. You’re the Associate Dean of Academics and Administration. You sort of oversee all the curriculum at ID. I’m wondering how you think about curriculum. When you’re sort of zooming out, looking over a student’s whole tenure at ID, how do you think about structuring that? Or can you talk a little bit about the process of putting curriculum together in an institution like that?

Matt Mayfield:

Sure. Well, thanks. Yeah, I’d be happy to. And one of the things that I think just my personal experience here is that I didn’t start from scratch. Actually, none of us did, right? We came into a school that was very established and doing very well and had found its way through the changes of design over the years. So part of the challenge is how do we continue that progress? How do we continue the strength of it while also being open to changes in the new things? It’s one of the things that, in kind of moving into this role, I really wanted to stay focused on was preserving that flexibility or that ability to continually refresh without having to rethink the entire thing.

That’s where I think sometimes curriculum and schools can get in trouble is they’re like, okay, we feel a little out of step, let’s rethink the whole thing. And it takes two years and lots of debate and all the while students are going through and they’re learning. And so I’m happy that we’ve got such a gracious faculty that’s willing to go along with the idea that we do have to adjust and integrate new ideas as they come in. And so that’s been a big piece of philosophy there.

And then the other is, as you said, thinking about the student journey and where they’re coming from. As a graduate-only school, we also have a bit of a luxury, which we protect a lot, is the notion that most of these students have professional experience, they’ve had some time to mature, and so we’re not going to worry as much about basics. About whether design is something that they should consider as a focus in their education, or whether they think they can build a career out of it. They’ve worked through that already and now we’re picking up with, yes, we all agree, design’s a really interesting field. There’s lots to learn here and lots to use. Now let’s take that step.

So I have been lucky to start with those very strong points of flexibility and a fairly well-developed student body so that we can step into some bigger issues. We still have challenges, of course, like anybody else, it’s hard to change, but it’s kind of where we’re starting from.

Jarrett Fuller:

I have a quick follow up question on that that I thought was really interesting about not starting from scratch and ID has this long history of innovation in design education and this legacy. Can you talk a little bit about what the connection threads are between its history that you think are still important and relevant in the curriculum today? And then where you are innovating, where you are trying new things that wouldn’t have been there 20 years, even 10 years ago?

Matt Mayfield:

Yeah. Okay. A great question. Yeah. I think that some of the through lines that, certainly with our latest an 85th anniversary and we did a 75th anniversary a while back, we’re able to take some stock and reflect a bit on our history. And so some of the through lines in the curriculum has been, how do I want to say this? Kind of experimentation, not in the complete invention space, but in the notion that, and this goes all the way back to the [inaudible 00:05:57], the capabilities of technology and industry, if you will, are really fascinating. And how as designers can we take advantage of these capabilities to build the things we want to build or at least articulate the futures we see that are more desirable than where we are now. So that’s kind of always been there and I think that continues.

Back in the early days of the school where it was much more about physical production and how can we make things more reliable and more ergonomic and things like that. And I remember as a student, we would be looking at production methods and ways to incorporate all sorts of different really exotic materials like plastic and rubber and all that stuff.

But I feel the same kind of questions here now though we’re talking about digital capabilities of managing massive amounts of data and interpreting that for an individual specific context. So those are still there.

I think the other part that we’ve been very lucky to align with is the notion that we were never really, well, I shouldn’t say never, but we broke free of a strong arts background a while ago, and that was, I think a very important divergence where we still, and this is where I want to get my colleagues, Zach in here, because we’re coming back to this where that pure kind of artist’s reflection of the world through expression of materials and ideas it’s still there. It’s never been super strong in our program because we’ve been more pragmatic, we’re more functional in our approach to design for a good and worse, good and bad. And so that served us well when we come into things like design thinking and our relationship with business where we could say design can help make whatever those products and services are better. We still have to define what better is, but that’s what designers are really good at. And so what I’m getting to is that we weren’t kind of beholden to notions of artistic expression and that helped us to define other ways of contributing and authoring our work.

Jarrett Fuller:

I want to come back to that idea, but Zach, I have another a question to build on something that Matt said that I’m curious your thoughts on, which is this sort of move from experimentation materially to experimentation digitally. And that’s not exactly how you phrased it, Matt, but this sort of the way we use new technologies in the design process.

And Zach, you have a background in computer science, you’re teaching a lot of digital tools and sort of emerging technologies. And I’m wondering how you think about that and how to think about where is the value for the designer? And just to frame this question, I’ve seen this happen two ways where designers sort of learn about new technologies purely conceptually, that these things exist and you should know about artificial intelligence or something like that. Or you should look know about big data. Or really, really technically where it’s like you need to learn how to use this software or you need to code in this language. And it seems like there’s some sort of balance between those two. And I’m wondering how you approach that or how you think about introducing new technologies into a curriculum.

Zach Pino:

That’s a fantastic question. I do want to point out at the head here that both Matt and I have backgrounds in computer science. So would love to hear Matt’s response.

Jarrett Fuller:

I did not know that Matt.

Zach Pino:

And we in fact both share a significant overlap in not only the computer science part, but in the fine arts side. So we both have had experience on both sides, at the University of Chicago in fact. So lots of overlap. But to get to the question.

So I think fundamentally when I came into ID seven years ago, I came into a school that as Matt described, was very much from my point of view, kind of a naive point of view, tied much more to the business side than the personal expression side. And so a lot of students at that time saw their opportunities as a designer tied to opportunities in consulting, opportunities in entrepreneurship, opportunities in joining in-house design teams that were fairly well-established. And over the last seven years at ID, we’ve seen this kind of seismic shift in what our students’ goals are as designers.

And so when I joined ID, students were very interested in picking up very hard technical skills because they knew that in some ways they would be going into the world to deploy design, whether that meant entrepreneurially building a digital product or needing to know enough about technology to communicate with an engineering team within their organization. And so in those early years, Matt was really open and flexible to us introducing courses in Python and JavaScript, those kind of very hard technical skills.

In more recent years, however, though we’ve seen students much, much less, almost zero interest in that kind of engagement with technology. Very much we suspect tied to changing social dynamics relationships with technology presumptions and perceptions of technology. And instead we see our students wanting to be working at a higher level and engaging engineering processes and engineering teams with critical oversight. And so our curriculum has needed to shift to accommodate that new goal that our students might have in their professional careers after graduate school, which means we are teaching not, this is how to write this kind of function in Python, though we certainly still do that, but we also now have courses such as surveys in emergent technology, studio courses in data visualization where we’re not teaching students how to necessarily write all of the code for making interactive data visualizations, but exposing students to data visualization tools and discipline norms, but then allowing them to explore what would it mean to hand draw a data visualization, as Matt hinted at, returning almost to the personal expression and personal agency associated with a traditional art and design program.

Jarrett Fuller:

You started answering my next question, but I’m curious if you could just clarify this a little bit more because I think one of the challenges in design education today, and this comes up in so many conversations that I have with educators, is just the field of design is so big. The areas for which students can go into is infinite. And you could go into data visualization, you could go into systems design, you could go into, I come from a graphic design background. You go into interface design. This sort of, I don’t want to say balance because that oversimplifies it, but the sort of tension between surveying all the opportunities or presenting or kind of visualizing the range of work while also having to go deep on some of those because it can’t just be the sort of cursory look. How do you think about those kind of survey classes, Zach, that you’re talking about? Introducing these with that sort of range of practice that is available to students?

Zach Pino:

Yeah. I’d love to hear Matt’s response to this as well, specifically regarding how we’re thinking about deep T and shallow T shaped people, which I’m not well-equipped to discuss. 

Jarrett Fuller:

Let me ask you a version of the question. Because I do want to hear Matt’s sort of larger view, but I think Zach, for you, how much of it is student-driven? Are students sort of coming into the class saying, we’re interested in these things, and then you’re tailoring these surveys to that versus things where you sort of say, here are some things that I think are interesting, here are some emerging practices, emerging technologies, and I’m going to kind of show these to you. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of relationship and dialogue?

Zach Pino:

I’m confident that in our courses, the model student is needing exposure to contemporary technologies more than they’re needing any degree of mastery over those technologies. And trends in technological development today have facilitated that kind of new orientation for our student body. We’ve seen this kind of incredible convergence of what was several years ago, as you described, a very wide diverse but disparate set of technical competencies. So just like you said, data visualization is going to be different than interaction design, which is going to be different from CAD, 3D modeling for fabrication.

In the last several years, certainly in the COVID and post- COVID time, there’s been this massive alignment and convergence in data-oriented practice, where every discipline of design and every technical vertical that a student might be interested in pursuing is going to be centered deeply in engagement with data and engagement with computational intelligence and computational creativity. And because of that alignment, it becomes a lot easier for us to teach that. The exposure that I mentioned, because we can go deep into this is what data is, these are the dimensions of data quality. These are the metrics by which we would evaluate to what degree a data set is valuable in design insight making, but we don’t need to necessarily cover the waterfront.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah. Matt, can you talk a little bit about this shallow and wide versus deep and narrow and how you sort of think about that?

Matt Mayfield:

Sure. And I concur with everything that Zach is saying is that there has been, I think a beneficial shift in this kind of more integrated way of thinking about data and technology as it’s kind of finding its way into all sorts of corners, which weirdly enough makes it a little easier to teach because it’s more pervasive. But I’m also interested, it is a balance I think about a lot, and I agree it can be perhaps too easily framed as this notion of deep versus shallow, lots versus little, or focused versus breadth. And I do think there is an interaction there.

I believe designers can be, I think more inspired when they have a little bit more than just awareness of something. They have to play with it. They have to say, oh, wait, wait, wait, this can do this. What if I do this? That’s where we get that fun creativity. So for me, I want to get our students to the point where they can play with technology. We’re not going to ever say, “Oh, okay, you are a certified engineer putting out commercial grade solutions.” Absolutely not. But we do want them to be able to engage engineers or whomever is involved with the development at these different levels, as Zach said, at a higher level in terms of more, are we doing this ethically? Are we being equitable? Where are our blind spots with how we are using this technology or the ways we see it progressing? But also at a slightly lower level where it is more of, hey, did we ever think about trying this? Would that be valuable?

And that’s the key question I think for all of our students is where is the value of it? And that is a very, I’m purposefully making that a very ambiguous term because that’s the discussion. What do we mean by value? Where is it? How can we get to it? Does everyone agree on that value?

And so being able to poke around in the technology enough to get a feel for it enough to understand the power there, because a lot of it is abstract when you say, oh, yes, well, machine learning takes in troves and troves of information. It’s like, oh, do you really know what that means? You could say it, but do you really feel it? And so that’s where I get most excited about is in that middle ground in exploring, and as Zach has done a fabulous job there in helping us find those spaces, and we do try to respond to students where they’re at and where they’re going, but to challenge and ask as well, why are we learning this? Where is this going to help us in our practice as designers?

Jarrett Fuller:

This next question is perhaps the biggest question of the conversation, but I want to ask you about that word value a little bit and sort of turn it back on the education experience. And you can speak about this specifically at ID or you could even, I’d be curious to hear both of your thoughts on this in design education generally.

But I think sort of graduate design education is in this sort of interesting spot where it can also do all sorts of things. Is the role, and I’m hearing bits of all of these things in both of your answers throughout this conversation. There is some sense of job preparation, sort of understanding the field and giving you skills to go work in the field. There’s some sense of experimentation that grad school is a type of laboratory to try things, to be critical, to be provocative, to challenge things. There’s some sense of graduate school being a chance to redefine the field, to redefine design, to challenge industry, to push industry forward. It’s a little of all of those plus more, but I’m wondering how you think about the role of graduate design education. What is the value that students get out of those two years? And I don’t mean that to sound critical. You know what I mean?

Matt Mayfield:

No, it’s a good question. It’s a great question and I’ll jump in. I think, and I could really only comfortably speak from our school. I have guesses at what others are, but I’m not going to pretend to know it. For our school and the students that we attract and the students that are successful coming through our program, we do see a lot, as Zach has also indicated, they’re not coming to us, or at least the bulk of them are not coming to us saying, “I want to get a job in UX and I’m going to come here to get trained to do that.” We think that’s a bit of a flag because yes, it’s possible to do that, but that’s really not what the full experience can be.

That full experience is a time to reflect, and that’s again why we’re so excited when we have somebody that has been practicing design for a little while and saying, “Hey, you know what? I think I want to learn more about my field and my practice. I want to explore a little bit, broaden my horizons.” We love that. I think those students do the best in our program, and it’s that reflective nature.

And to me, that’s where the value is. If we want to kind of get it down to the crass exchange here, they are choosing to spend, depending on the program, a couple of years to step back from their practice, not to not do their practice, but to not be stuck in the constraints of a job-oriented right workload, and to give themselves a little bit of freedom to explore and think.

For some students, parts of their design practice they stumbled on, they learned on their own. They never really had a chance to examine it in a more formal setting. And so we can support that, and it’s not just the faculty, but with other students.

And I think that’s where our program is strongest, is within the cohort, the community of students that are able to bring different perspectives, different experiences. And so to me, that’s where the real value is. It’s always student-focused.

And as I think about the curriculum and as I work with the faculty, my drive is these students want to be masters in design. Can we capture that? How do we get them to be masters? And what does that mean? The ability to have a lot of perspective and be able to ask really great in questions that open up conversations that move things forward, that bring insight to the debate, that are able to inspire others to see maybe the opportunities in a different way.

To me, if a student walks out of here doing that, they’ve gotten what they came for, and they are well positioned to influence wherever they land, wherever they work with, because they won’t be doing it alone. They will be doing it with others, and we think that’s super important. So that’s where I kind of anchor the value of at least our program. And I think for the most part, graduate education, I think I would argue, kind of falls into that.

Jarrett Fuller:

It reminds me of something I read in an interview a long time ago, and I apologize, I forget where this was or who said it, but they were talking about when you should go to graduate schools, and I repeat this to my undergrads all the time, who want to go to graduate school. I was like, “You go to graduate school when you’ve worked in the industry long enough to be frustrated by it.” And then you can go back and use that time. Zach, do you have thoughts on that?

Zach Pino:

On the timing question in particular?

Jarrett Fuller:

I mean timing, but even just that sort of value of that time, what do you want students to get out of that?

Zach Pino:

Yeah, I mean, what’s so hard about any sort of engagement with a graduate curriculum is that you are, in the case of many of our students, you are coming into a new discipline or, as you’re describing, some kind of minor to extreme reorientation within your discipline. But everyone at that graduate program is going to be talking almost exclusively about how quickly the field is changing. And that is especially true of design.

Design was very well-defined and established in the nineties and then aughts, and as ever since, has really been challenged in almost every flank. Whether that’s kind of the implications of being a creator in a world with significant sustainability challenges or being a responsible researcher, but also being tied to certain kinds of perhaps ill-defined business metrics and timelines.

And so our students are coming in and they’re seeking clarity. They’re seeking a lane to place themselves in, and all we can do is tell them there are no lanes right now, or the lanes are yet to be established. And the students who are, I’d love to hear Matt’s feedback on this as well, but the students that are most effective here at ID from my point of view, are those that are willing to embrace that ambiguity and recognize that their time with us is in fact to help establish those lanes for the next generation of designers and design students.

Matt Mayfield:

Absolutely. If I may.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, please.

Matt Mayfield:

I want to highlight that because I do think that’s where design is most exciting. It is in the new intersections, in the new applications, in the new types of jobs. When I graduated from my undergraduate in design, we essentially at the time had kind of design thinking as our focus, but no one talked about it that way. No one recognized it that way. No companies were hiring design thinkers. It wasn’t there. But it was the confidence that I could add value. And I just took time to figure out how to define that in the terms of the day. But I completely agree with Zach. It is challenging in that it’s a field in flux, but I think that’s the most exciting part is that flux gives you opportunity.

Jarrett Fuller:

I mean, I always say every generation of designers gets to redefine design for that generation. It is this sort of constant change. I have two more sort of quick questions. I want to go back to this thread that’s come up again and again in this conversation about this sort of push and pull of artistic expression. And I forget the exact sort of matrix that you use there.

But I come from a graphic design background, and so much of early graphic design theory and history was really about separating graphic design from art that this was not personal expression, we said. There’s a lot of graphic design that has sort of moved back towards that. There’s now sort of a range of opinions on that. But I think on the surface level, those can feel so at odds with each other. This idea of human-centered, of developing personas and user experience and all of these things with the designer’s point of view, with this idea of expression. And I’m wondering how you think about the blending of these, the fact that both of these things can happen at the same time. How do you think about that both as a sort of institution but then also on a project by project basis?

Matt Mayfield:

It’s a great question, and I could tell in the way that I deal with my students is that, and I teach more kind of classes that are much more oriented towards business. So how to plan product lines and how to think about what’s next with products being really much more sophisticated nowadays, those permutations become really, really interesting.

But that being said, I talk a lot about that the work we do in design and thinking about what’s possible certainly has to be grounded in research and information. We want to make good decisions. I said, but there is a point in every project, in every work that you as a designer, you are interpreting this. You have an authorship role in how this work is being handled, how you adjust and how you conform to your constraints, that’s you making choices. And I think we should embrace that. That is something that is important.

And it may not be the free form expression of art, but there is an authorship. There is a decision to say, this is the way I’m looking at this problem. This is the way that I chose to shape it or kind of interpret what we’re seeing with a team or without a team. And I tell my students, I said, “You should embrace that. You do have a place in this. You do have a voice. We just want to make sure we understand how much of that voice, we obviously have biases and we have all sorts of blind spots, so you have to be aware of that, and so pay attention to that, but don’t ever suppress your voice. You are not a machine to make this work and to be very objective.” Design is still very much, I believe, a subjective field. It is. It’s an interpretation of what we think should be or could be or ought to be. And those are the things that designers should be thinking about, and you can’t remove yourself from that conversation.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, I love that. That’s really well said. Zach, what about you?

Zach Pino:

I, like many of our students, entered design not from a straight line, not from a straight path. And so the field that I entered circa mid-2010s was really a field that had over-expressed and overexerted itself and so much into adjacent disciplines, whether that was the social sciences or engineering, that it had in some ways lost a sense of itself and its own core value and competencies.

And so as you described, Jarrett, this kind of retreat that many of the design disciplines have gone through in the last 10 years or so, really reflects this kind of recognition that design had not only overexerted itself, but it had become reliant on a very kind of convoluted self-justification. That I’m going to go out into the world and I’m going to say this is what the world is asking for. That’s the problem. I’m calling that the problem, and it’s not my problem that I’m identifying. It’s the world’s problem, and now I’m going to solve it, and here’s my answer to that problem. And it’s the kind of weird circular logic that’s still deeply embedded in a lot of, especially traditional design practice and business-oriented design practice and this kind of weird slippage that happens in authorship space and agency space. When you lose track of the fact that you are not working in service of you are in fact a creator, you are identifying this particular set of issues to address with your creative outputs.

That, for many of our students, is incredibly refreshing because they’re wanting to bring this kind of values orientation, value-driven motivation, ethics-driven motivation. They’re working on behalf of inclusion, equity, sustainability. And so we are seeing not only retreats to these traditional justifications for our value, but also students are really wanting to be personally expressive. They’re wanting the work to reflect their vision and not mask that in, this is what the company is asking me for in the brief, or this is the set of personas that I’ve developed and artificial problems I’ve identified.

Jarrett Fuller:

Right. I’m so mad you brought this up right at the end. That’s a whole other conversation.

Zach Pino:

Sorry.

Jarrett Fuller:

I have so many things to talk about with that.

Zach Pino:

Sorry. Sorry.

Jarrett Fuller:

I agree with you a hundred percent.

Zach Pino:

Yeah, but I think that that’s where not to, I know we’re at time here, but a lot of the technical skills that are relevant to today’s designers are all about redefining this intermediation, this indirectness that is so central to design action in the world that by choosing a dataset and bringing that into your generative design practice, in my case, you are kind of delegating a huge amount of your authorship to that dataset and the people who produced it. And with that indirectness, in the same way a printmaker is working very differently than a painter, we find that our outcomes tend to be a much more defendable, a much more flexible, and much more responsive to reality.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah, I love that. Let me ask you both. One quick question to wrap up, Matt, I want to hear from you first. We’re talking about this sort of rapid change of design. What about design is exciting you right now?

Matt Mayfield:

Oh my goodness. Outside of this conversation? This is great. No, I think it is this, and I do like the word Zach used that there’s a refreshing-ness happening. There’s an optimism that’s coming in. And it’s less, and this is something I’m also very excited about with our school, is that we don’t stop at kind of the outrage or the critical thinking. We say, okay, great. Now what do we do about that? Where do we go? And that’s so awesome. That’s just great. I feel very encouraged that these students are going to go out and make fantastic impacts in the world because they can bring that optimism and their values into their work.

Jarrett Fuller:

I love that. Zach, what about you? What’s exciting about design to you right now?

Zach Pino:

I am extraordinarily driven at this particular moment in design as a discipline’s trajectory by the fact that today’s design does not need to be resolved fully or even fully understood by the designer when it is introduced into the world. And I know that that sounds really scary and that I might be promulgating a certain kind of sloppiness with design practice, but with so many data-oriented tools and computational kind of intelligent tools today, we have this remarkable capability to design and experience 80%, 50%, 20%, and then let context and dynamics and preferences and dimensions of the human engaging our designs fill in that remaining space and have algorithms react in response. And so as I say, that is often scary in the moment, and we’re seeing the limitations and weaknesses and over-exuberance by many computational designers in this moment. But this kind of opportunity to create not singular, fully understood designs, but rather incredibly intricate, complicated, flexible, dynamic multiples of our experience, that as a designer I might not ever fully comprehend, is really just a tremendous moment in design.

Jarrett Fuller:

I love this. This is such an optimistic ending to this conversation. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. This was great. Matt and Zach, thanks so much for doing this. Sure.

Matt Mayfield:

Sure, thank you.

Zach Pino:

It’s great. Thank you so much.

Jarrett Fuller:

With Intent is a production of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. This season is produced in collaboration with the School’s 85th anniversary as part of the 2022–2023 Latham Fellowship. A special thanks to all of our guests this season and everyone at ID for their support. My name is Jarrett Fuller. Thanks for listening.