Keywords

1. The new Craftsperson

2. Industry of One

3. Creative Practitioners

4. Research-Design Practice

5. Propositonal Practice

6. Post_Professional Design

7. Creating Design Leaders

8. Publicly funded design practice

Often – How we speak about design education has a very strong whiff of legacy thinking – where we look at ‘jobs’ in the way they were viewed decades ago – potentially in the 1980s.

We have a education where notions of ‘employability’ are often spoken of in the context of ‘design staff’ in manufacturing enterprises or in consultancies servicing these enterprises. These jobs are hard to come by – and why would an education provider train its graduates for a sector that will not employ them.

Similarly skilling up students – where these skills are only relevant in specific contexts of work/ work environments – may be fine, but if these skills are offered in place of other knowledge/ training and skills that would be more useful and appropriate in contemporary Australia – then we have a problem on our hands.

In effect the notion of training for a profession is dangerous – and an uncertain location for gainful employment. We are seeing around us a world of work that is post-professional in a context of enterprise that is post-Industrial.

The term Post Professional (varadarajan) refers to the end of specialization and the folding back of the notion of industrial design partially into a preindustrial and partially into a post Industrial paradigms of practice. Where multiple paradigms of creative practice coexist with the essentially Industrial – manufacturing complex – context of ID practice. In this last design is a function – not so much a practice – within the product development process of serial production. Often product development within serial production is defined by the imperatives of incremental change – and demand a notion of the ‘design job’ that is exquisitely procedural and largely cosmetic. The Pre and Post Industrial do not situate the designer within a corporate context and leave her free to be visionary, idealistic and propositional. Design is thus Proposed and not Justified.

We in effect need to have a progressive educational paradigm where the curriculum is reflective of the needs of work environments that current and future creatives will encounter.

First – Jobs have been disappearing. So more entrepreneurship has been called for from creatives!

Then – The times are tough and we must not forget that. Design graduates are doing it tough. Designers are doing it tough. Its nowhere near as dire as Europe – almost 40% youth unemployment in certain parts.

The youth unemployment rate in Europe, comprising workers aged 15-24, was 20.4 per cent in Britain in the second quarter of 2011, 27.7 per cent in Italy, and 29.8 per cent in Ireland.

In Spain where youth have taken to the streets to protest at the grim outlook for their economic future, the youth unemployment rate has soared to 45 per cent. And in Greece, the epicentre of the European sovereign debt crisis, it was 42.9 per cent in the same quarter.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/young-workers-hit-by-rising-unemployment-20120124-1qevx.html#ixzz1kLVV98KX

Now there are two forms the entrepreneurship could take: One will be in the traditional ‘aesthetic object’ sector. This has elsewhere been referred to in two ways: One, as designer makers where the focus is upon the notion of the designer as a new craftsperson, making one-off artefacts for contract or retail consumption.  Two, is where the potential of contemporary-computer enabled and sophisticated micro manufacturing technologies allows for serial production without the need for tooling. The liberation from expensive tooling has meant all manner of, potentially homewares, products can be produced by the designer – and in this way they become the “Industry of One”.

Hence Industry of One!

Second – Design practitioners have three modes of operation: as employees, as designer-makers, and as creative(design-research) practitioners!

Something on these sectors and the skill sets required in each.

1. Design for Industry

2. Industry of One

3. Creative Research Practice

Third – Globality and the Innovation sector!

Many of the multinationals have acknowledged the importance of ‘design thinking’. This has created a particular intellectual space within these companies – such as Nokia – where the focus is upon visualizing plausible scenarios and technological solutions that enable the scenarios. Designers are being recruited into these positions. I have seen this in India. We train students to be visionaries – today. We could do more to sustain the spirit of innovation with higher level opportunities and challenges for the students’ to encounter.

And so on to articulate a vision for, a space for, Industrial Design in contemporary society.

(Notes from the Research Project – The ID Ecosystem)

More red meat for the girls. But no more junk food. Bu junk sex?

via Stop being Mr Potatoheads, say new guidelines.

via EU and fish quotas: Who will protect these fish from our feeding frenzy? | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

via Bloggingheads: Making College Cheaper – Video Library – The New York Times.

Moreover, Cannadine observes, depending on context and circumstances, both white and dark-skinned peoples of the empire were seen as superior; or alternatively as inferior. British imperialists loathed Indians and Africans no more nor less than they loathed the great majority of Englishmen and were far more willing to work with maharajahs, kings, and chiefs of whatever colour than with white settlers, whom they generally considered as uneducated trash. Just as Jamaican peasants and East End costermongers were viewed as equally inferior, so Indian princes and West African tribal chiefs were often understood as the social equivalent of English gentlemen. Indeed, British rulers were often amused that lower class white settlers were unable to comprehend that aristocratic breeding cut across differences of colour. Lady Gordon, wife of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, the governor of Fiji, thought the native, high-ranking Fijians such an undoubted aristocracy. Their manners, she wrote, are so perfectly easy and well bred… Nurse cant understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I dont like to tell her that these ladies are my equals, which she is not!

via Kenan Maliks review of Ornamentalism by David Cannadine.

via Kenan Maliks review of Ornamentalism by David Cannadine.

via The Tyranny of Meritocracy – Megan McArdle – Business – The Atlantic.

This is Dierderek’s description: “The bunker has been finished for quite a while now and has settled into the country side very well. The Besser block air lock and smoke door went on with a minimum of fuss and we have practised sitting in it for a period of time. We have stocked it with food and water and sleeping gear (in case we lose the house). The metal file drawer is for insurance and personal effects. The sign is a personal touch and present from my Mother in law. I feel we have created an escape from a large fire and, at the least, i have not been complacent.”

“There is still a powerful sense around — fair or not — of a whole society paying for the errors and irresponsibility of bankers; of messages not getting through; of impatience with a return to ‘business as usual’ — represented by still soaring bonuses and little visible change in banking practices,” he said in an article published in The Financial Times.

With the Church of England’s leadership in a crisis over its handling of the protesters, the archbishop’s remarks seemed to offer a belated attempt to lay out an agenda.

Dr. Williams supported a Vatican statement last week endorsing the idea of a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transaction and for a separation of the retail and investment operations banks that have relied on bailouts from public funds.

“These ideas — ideas that have been advanced from other quarters, religious and secular, in recent years — do not amount to a simplistic call for the end of capitalism, but they are far more than a general expression of discontent,” he said.

“If we want to take seriously the moral agenda of the protesters at St Paul’s, these are some of the ways in which we should be taking it forward,” the article said, but it urged the protesters to be “a bit more specific,” arguing the three proposals made by the Vatican should become a springboard for debate.

“If religious leaders and commentators in the U.K. and elsewhere could agree on these three proposals, not as a fixed agenda but as a common ground on which to start serious discussion, the struggles and questionings alike of protesters and clergy at St Paul’s will not have been wasted.”

via Archbishop of Canterbury Endorses Tax on Bankers – NYTimes.com.

The goal is to expose the nine entrepreneurs on the one-week program to the ways Silicon Valley goes about innovating “and then bring those experiences back to Japan to spread to other entrepreneurs,” Kan says.

Among the stops on the trip: Lessons on design thinking from Adaptive Path and LUXr, learning about agile development from Pivotal Labs and product design from IDEO, and a prototyping session from Google+’s Bradley Horowitz.

Also on the docket: a workshop on pitching angel investors and venture capitalists at 500 Startups’ downtown Mountain View penthouse labs.

“You want to make sure you communicate confidence,” instructed Kandice Cota, the workshop leader and CEO of IP Franchise, a social game company, as Stanford Unversity’s famous Hoover Tower hovered in the distance, beyond 500 Startups’ floor-to-ceiling windows.

The TOFU Project is the brainchild of Lisa Katayama, a San Francisco-based journalist who grew up in Japan (and who writes for Fast Company as well as Wired, the New York Times Magazine, and NPR) and Tomo Saito, a designer and photographer who created Betabrand’s Japants cargo pants. Among its advisors are MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, RISD president John Maeda, and Kiva cofounder Matt Flannery.

via How The TOFU Project Is Teaching Silicon Valley Values To Japanese Entrepreneurs | Fast Company.

I saw this video last week and as I mowed the lawn over the weekend I mowed angrily at the sheer waste and lifelessness of this ‘future’ that microsoft is seeing. Then it seemed like such a pretentious thought – elf righteous almost. So I didn’t post the long train of thought – and finished up the lawn edging with a whipper snipper.

Then thankfully someone else is taking a shot at Microsoft’s vision. Yes a decade or more after minority report. And almost as bad as Volkswagon 2028 – but they acn be forgiven for they are after all only a car company – no visionaries there.

See an interview of the vsion here

If you want to see the vision this is the link – in Youtube.

What do you think of Microsoft’s vision?