Will, it is never about absolutes, but about critical mass. There will always be people who excel outside the directed path, but I'll take 100 years of education history that has gone through several generations of critique to (still) evolve into what it has achieved today towards creating designers, and use THAT as my model for creating design education than blow it up and start from scratch due to and i'll be blunt here: laziness, impatience, free market bullshit and lack of passion.
1. if you don't have it in your neck of the woods, stop looking for hacks, and build it or move. This is EXACTLY what China has done. They saw that being a manufacturing giant left them exposed and what did they do, put out a mission to have 400 design schools within the near future. 2. Find REAL alternatives. When formal education doesn't make sense, maybe it means you have to take a few steps backwards in your career to move forward. This is a model that many people including myself have done. I left the comfort of 2D design to work in an industrial design studio and the last 2 years were better than going to conferences, reading and remote learning for sure. Find your alternatives and don't be afraid to move backwards for a spell. To the educators. Don't pretend. Let's see the portfolios that come out of UK's hybrid program and then decide. In the end the proof is in the pudding and the portfolio quality is all that matters to future recruiters. I'm pessimistic of the program's ability to really transform people into designers with creative stamina that comes out of a 24/7 studio environment, but hey! let's see what happens. Employers/Recruiters: Get real about your expectations and hiring practices. Is the paper what you are looking for, or are you looking for great designers? Can you create programs and practices that build designers inside your current institutions? or are you just creating a carousel factory that people come in young, leave and new people come in at senior levels. What about building from within? this isn't just about tuition re-imbursement, but about moving past stupid rigid corporate policies around "$2k limits" for conferences, not creating in-house libraries, and having rigid requirements for management positions to have masters level education. The reason I point to the employers is that b/c of these stale philosophies educators really can't innovate correctly. they create "remote" education b/c of the lack of available market to support better and more practical education alternatives due to corporate rigidness and short-sightedness. Just sayin' Last point, it all depends on what you want to be when you grow up. If you want to work with other design disciplines studio as a language will be important. It was soooo hard for me culturally to fall into an ID studio and still I'm learning more teaching within an ID department at SCAD. Leaving behind my more rational and analytic thoughts and linguistic modes of constructing the world around me is taxing and wonderous. This won't happen for you unless you dive into a true design environment. Very few of us are going to be great, just b/c we are. We have to earn it, and we have to be open to change to reach for it. -- dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37349 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
