Design Education (f2f)
Dan Saffer makes some good points about design education and why it doesn’t work in distance ed very well (at least currently):
Many things can be taught via distance learning: accounting, literature, programming, some of the sciences. But design isn’t one of them.
Why? Because the best design programs are studio programs. They rely on a deep interplay between student (apprentice), teacher (master), and other students. This interplay is, I feel, impossible to replicate remotely with our current level of technology.
Design cannot be taught by books or lectures alone. You can learn about design through lectures and books, but you won’t learn design. And I say this as the author of two design books. Design can only be learned by doing, by making. And in an academic setting, that means studio work, studio work that is critiqued by professors. Critiques are best when the participants are in the same physical space, communicating freely, often working directly with or on the artifact being discussed to improve it.
See his post for the rest of it.
[via Kick It]
Actually all his points are easily challenged, as you’ll see from the comments on his post. Design is taught extremely well via distance methods, and good teaching is not bound by the space in which it takes place but by the abilities of the teachers and the students.
Having taught design in many spaces, including the studio, I’d quite happily see the traditional studio banished forever in return for a good seminar room with a kettle and a plentiful supply of tea bags…