I am writing in response to Bruce’s question about design education and research. At Parsons, Design Research has become a requirement for all undergraduate programs. But by that, we mean a variety of research skills including those most often used by researchers working in industry, practicing human centered or user experience centered research and design. Like all design schools, we are required to provide 42 credits of liberal arts in each of these programs. It would be ideal, in my opinion, if design schools not only focused on teaching design research but also on a wider variety of research skills and methods in the social sciences. For me, the most relevant discipline would be anthropology. If design schools could integrate courses on social theory and method, both classic texts and contemporary, I think that designers would have a greater understanding of the complexity involved in social research - and in the ‘world making’ that design involves. I also think that it would enable instructors in upper level courses to create far more complex studio projects involving more substantial upfront research and yielding more conceptually complex and socially relevant outcomes.
That said, design students will not graduate with the kind of grounding in social theory that is acquired by a graduate student in anthropology or sociology or cognitive psychology. I think that we have to continue to employ specialists in these fields - people who have a deep understanding of complex social systems and modes of human interaction, people who have developed an extremely high capacity for analytical rigor, people who can identify and solve for complex problems. Giving design students a grounding that enables them to appreciate what these specialists bring to Reciprocally, the growing attention to the anthropology of business and the work done by anthropologists in design fields, will help to educate these specialists prior to their arrival in the design studio. I am thinking here of the excellent work done by William Mazzarella on advertising in his work Shovelling Smoke: Advertising adn Globalization in Contemporary India or Moeran’s work on the Japanese Advertising Agency. These sorts of texts really help to raise the level of discussion in classes addressing advertising and graphic design because they connect this work to social processes in local and global contexts.