Interesting article in Fast Company about John Maeda’s efforts to rethink design education: Digital Thinking at Rhode Island School of Design - The Double Vision of John Maeda | Fast Company.
The money quote:
the corporate world could use an infusion of their avant-gardism to offset the more strategy-driven and market-obsessed approaches of schools such as the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Stanford. “I think that mapping corporate needs onto a design problem is sometimes really informative and can give students the language they need to be designers who fit into the world better,” he says. “But sometimes you want to say, ‘Let’s think of problems that are totally impractical and different from what you’re going to learn on the job.’ I want our students to be able to talk to CEOs, but I don’t want them to have to Drucker up.”
And
While the corporate world is obsessed with the idea of design thinking — which relies on data and process for inspiration — Maeda is skeptical. “Design thinking is basically about being able to make good PowerPoint slides — the quad-chart slide, the stakeholder slide. I get that. I think it’s important. But at the same time, you hear whispers, even at Stanford, that people aren’t making things anymore.” Scott Klinker, head of the 3-D design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, who defended the intuitive, qualitative approach to design at this year’s Industrial Designers Society of America conference, agrees: “The proponents of the strategy-based approach say, ‘Don’t worry about form. We’ll save you with design thinking.’ I think that’s crap. Design has always been a complex synthesis of analytical and intuitive processes.”
