Design education in the post-digital age

Design Management Journal, Summer 2002 by Maeda, John

STRATEGIES

tal technologies have become an end unto themselves. Today, mastering and keeping up with the latest tools matters more than creating programs and output that enhance the lives of users. John Maeda advocates a people-centered approach to technology and digital design education. He critiques current problems and presents case studies to challenge teachers and designers to be more creative and to move in richer, more-humane directions.

There was a time when I would seek out the top Web sites of the day and e-mail the creator with a simple message: "Would you like to pursue graduate studies in advanced digital at MIT?" I did this for about half a year, until continuous failure in my recruitment efforts forced me to stop. I was consistently receiving this message: "I didn't go to college, so why would I want to go to graduate school?"

I would ask them why they didn't go to college. The consistent reply was, "I tried, but I found that my professors knew very little, if anything, about digital media." Not only that, but the knowledge in which my correspondents were interested was not to be found in a classroom-it existed in magazines, new books, and on the Web, so why bother with academia?

Compound this disappointing sentiment toward educational institutions with the peak of the Web boom. Young people were being recruited with offers of six-figure salaries and more. Young people who were already facing the prospect of spending in the six figures to attend college were naturally interested in a job that would send their bank accounts in the opposite direction! Truly, only a fool would go to school in such a climate.1

For design education, the marked reduction in qualified and enthusiastic applicants as a factor was only equaled by what had happened with the advent of the computer. The introduction of graphical computing and the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 soon drew a distinction between the pre-computer designer and the post-computer designer. A machine that could trivialize any hard-earned drawing skill with the click of a mouse was not to the taste of a generation that prided itself on mechanical skills. The field of graphic design quickly became a battleground between older designers and younger designers.

That battle is over. The Web has won, and any designer that has not adapted to the computer is either lying or out of work. Many of the great postWorld War II designers have passed on to the next life, and they have been replaced with a new generation of heroes. The Flash masters and Photoshop gurus are the new kings and queens of the digital design era. Adobe continues to dominate the field of visual expression, either by purchasing its competition or by shipping incomplete software that enslaves designers to the craving for the newest releases.

Design schools today employ an entire generation of disillusioned pre-computer design educators who feel increasingly irrelevant and are retiring en masse. Meanwhile, the post-computer design educators are scrambling to stay current with tools and systems that are born and evolve on an hourly basis. For the full-time educator, the game of staying current is impossible; indeed, the students themselves can barely keep abreast of the latest technologies. The consensus heard in the field is that there is no time to teach design when teaching the digital tools has become a full-time job.

My purpose here is to examine the nature of digital media within the context of computation, digital design education, and what I refer to as the "ecology of expression." The research conducted by me and my colleagues in MIT's Aesthetics and Computation Group is just one means for charting a path for the future of digital media.

The human constraints of digital tools

One could argue that the universal language of mathematics and its intrinsic relationship to digital media could only result in a universal language of expression. Today, designers worldwide use digitally identical tools to create work that services the entire world, and thus the proof appears complete. However, the reality of digital media systems is that the complex weave of programming codes bears the culture-specific imprint of the humans who designed and implemented its digital structures. The presumed purely logical structure of a computer program hides a series of unsolved problems and a great deal of character left by its creator. These completely human imperfections inevitably mandate the true capabilities of a software system.

Software is best thought of as a tree of logic, as diagrammed in the simple fictional program in Figure 1. At each juncture, starting from the root of the tree, the computer makes a decision based upon some input that leads its point of view to a new juncture, and so on. As the computer traverses this structure, the user sees new visual elements, such as a dialogue box or a change in her document, which in turn elicits a response from the user, which moves the computer further through its tree of logic. Each branch of logic is put in place by a human hand (the programmer's) with the purpose of allowing greater flexibility for the user's input that can result in a wider spectrum of outcomes.