Orientation: Getting Started

Being a Design Leader

Design education is different. Design schools are one of those great British Victorian inventions, a bit like the railway system. They were initiated by British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel in 1832 and had the very specific brief of developing design skills and knowledge in the industrial heartlands of Britain. The form of education that developed was very distinctive from university education since it was based on learning through making, and understanding problems and solutions through engagement with materials and process.

While design education contains significant elements of what is termed 'formal learning', it has evolved into something which values risk-taking and experimentation. It emphasises students' discovery and expression of their distinctive unique voice through their chosen design discipline.

Because design education places an emphasis on creativity and risk-taking, then designers can make a significant contribution to corporate environments, public services and education. In part, it is because their talents complement those of more formally educated managers and professionals. Business and social science education places emphasis on dissecting problems and issues, encouraging students to cut through irrelevancies, emphasising hard facts and encouraging students to understand the essential structure of problems. In other words such education is very problem oriented.

Designers, on the other hand, are very good is bringing surprising things together, at assembling and synthesising. They are encouraged to refine their judgement and their intuition, and to trust these in developing solutions. At times designers will be very swift in coming up with the detailed end result and have to work backwards to justify it as a solution. Designers are solution led.

When we assess design students, we are not looking for “right answers”, rather we are looking for appropriate creative processes and approaches. Because we encourage risk-taking, then the end result may fail. But that does not mean the student does. We are more interested in them understanding why the end result did not succeed and what they learned from that.

So, in this module we would like you to experiment and take risks. We want you to be prepared to fail, because if we are not prepared to do that then we will never ever do anything creative. My definition of being ‘creative’ is that of Sir Ken Robinson: having original ideas that have value. I want you to talk to each other, share experiences and collaborate, for that is what design teams do. And at times this whole approach may feel uncomfortable, but very rarely can we do anything new, worthwhile or challenging whilst in our comfort zone.

The artist, musician and producer Brian Eno wrote recently how there are two types of people in any domain. There are farmers. And there are cowboys. Farmers do the vital job of cultivation, of marshalling resources, of implementing and maintaining accepted and effective systems for cultivation. They are necessarily rule-based. Cowboys open up new territories, without them there would be no new farms, they map uncharted lands, they take risks and at times shoot from the hip.

Welcome to the new frontier.

What You Will Do In This Module

By the end of this module you will produce a prototype of small-scale online learning resource. It will apply the principles of user centred design in its conception and development, and will make use of appropriate user research. More on the formal assessment requirements later.

There are five ‘blocks’ of learning in this module each of which is described below.