What design education tells us about design theory: a pedagogical genealogy

ABSTRACT

In design theory, we often come across scholarly efforts that seek to define design as a unique discipline and to characterize it as a distinct category of practice, with its own epistemology in that it differs from sciences, arts and humanities (Cross, N. 2011. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Oxford: Berg.; Dorst, K. 2015. Frame innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Nelson, H. G., and E. Stolterman. 2012. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. The MIT Press.; Redström, J. 2017. Making Design Theory. MIT Press.). Although such efforts are helpful in teasing forward the nature of design epistemologies and practices, we question them by critically engaging with epistemic paradigms informing design education, its structural forms, origins and purposes, historically, while suggesting the time has come to reevaluate design’s relationships with other epistemological traditions, including the sciences and humanities. We unpack history of design education, in order to problematize what we have come to view as overly schematized epistemological distinctions, most notably the asserted opposition between (what Schön calls) technical rationality and an alternative epistemology broadly linked to pragmatism and/or phenomenology. We do so by offering a genealogy of design education showing that since the nineteenth century, design programmes have continuously, if diversely, taught novice designers, methods, crafts, and attitudes that reflect diverse epistemological traditions. Theorists and educators of design have a shared interest in balancing the needs to appreciate and help develop that which is distinctive of design and also to build upon design’s rich epistemological connections to the sciences and humanities. Whereas the former helps the field improve its abilities to contribute to society, the latter provides many of the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical resources that make such contributions possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Design education
• design theory
• hybrid pedagogy
• design epistemology

Introduction

More than one century of design education demonstrates the productive value behind the integration of what HCI and design theory scholars have marked as seemingly oppositional epistemologies, that is between technical rationality on the one hand, and other epistemologies (e.g. pragmatism or phenomenology) on the other. Our historical understanding of design and design education suggested to us that design is a cross disciplinary field by definition. In this paper we delimit our research within the area of design education and we adopt a historical and epistemological perspective. We motivate our choice by arguing that the history of design education is a valid point of departure for studying and questioning the ways that design relates to – and distinguishes itself from – other intellectual and professional disciplines.

As design’s encounters with the technical rationality of the sciences, its complex institutional relationships with schools of art, and its more recent encounters with engineering and entrepreneurial innovation all suggest, design’s identity and perceived professional value are often tied to its disciplinary entanglements. Particularly in the realm of design theory, such entanglements have often obfuscated continuities in design that span 150 years (Bardzell 2019). Historical case studies of design schools since the nineteenth century certify that statement. For instance, Cooper Union blended political and social sciences with design, and the Bauhaus integrated art and technology. Similarly, the Ulm school brought theories from social science, and system sciences to the curricula; the Chicago school of design pioneered an interdisciplinary design pedagogy based on a ‘unification of formerly separated and independent fields’¹ (Findeli 1990; Findeli and Benton 1991), K3 Malmö university attempted to integrate information technology and natural sciences with democracy and art (Ehn 1998). The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, known as a pioneer of Interaction Design, blended computer science, entrepreneurship, and design, and Indiana University HCI/d integrates the humanities, HCI, and design, within a school of computing and engineering. The study also shows that the design programmes are variations on a theme, that is, that they share several distinctive features.

In all these examples, technical aspects of design education tend to cohere with a technical rationality, while other aspects of design education – aesthetics, qualitative research, UX research, participation, among others – are mainly informed by a combination of pragmatism and phenomenology. Although design and HCI scholars tend to assert that technical rationality is at odds with design’s use of pragmatist and phenomenological epistemologies (Schön 1983; Suchman 1987; Winograd 1986) we show that the epistemologies have been consistently integrated throughout history of design education, suggesting that the purposes of teaching designers seem at least partly out of sync with those theorizing it; we account for this in what follows. Further as we see in history, new forms of design have been created thanks to this very integration, such as social design, interaction design, interdisciplinary design, industrial design, etc. The goal of the present research is to improve understandings of these syntheses and the ways through which it has been productive, hoping that, this will inspire, contribute to and foster other disciplines’ hybrid pedagogy practices.

We first motivate the (apparent) conflict between technical rationality and other epistemologies in design. Next, we introduce nine design schools in relation to four different designer-subjects that they produce as outcomes: a socially progressive and democratized designer-subject; a designer who balances sciences, humanities, arts, and/or technology; the designer as scientist or researcher; and finally, the designer as an entrepreneur. By introducing these subjects, we demonstrate that not only has technical rationality consistently been a part of design education, but also that its apparent frictions with pragmatist and phenomenological ideas notwithstanding, encounters between the epistemologies have been productive both of design disciplines and of designers as a certain kind of professional subject (e.g. progressive social actors, entrepreneurs, and theorist-practitioners). More subtly, this tension produces dynamics that have helped design adapt to changing social, technical, and political situations.

Technical rationality and other epistemologies in HCI and design

Historically, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and design research have tended to schematize epistemic paradigms, often as a rhetorical tactic to create distance between design rationalistic and positivistic epistemologies. For instance, Donald Schön, who was highly influenced by John Dewey’s pragmatism, asserts an opposition between the dominant epistemology of practice, which is rationalism or as he called it, technical rationality, on the one hand, and a form of pragmatism on the other, which he calls reflective practice. Technical rationality consists in the instrumental and rigorous process of problem solving, by applying scientific theories and techniques (Schön 1983, 21). In this view, attention is usually focused on solving problems using standardized knowledge and processes, and practitioners are seen as problem solvers. In Schön’s view, this is an incomplete perspective, as practitioners need to go through a special activity, called problem framing before actually being able to solve a problem. Likewise, Rittel and Webber attribute failures of policymaking and urban planning on rationalistic problem-solving mentalities in domains characterized by ‘wicked problems’ that resist traditional problem-solving (Rittel and Webber 1973).

Rationalism as a philosophy is mainly associated to the philosopher René Decartes and the legacies of positivism in the twentieth century, but within the history of design, the term rationalism emerged only during 1920s and 1930s to refer to a design and architectural movement that arose in Italy (e.g. De Fusco 1985). Although distinct from Cartesian rationalism, it borrows clearly many of its principles. For instance, in design terms, it introduces fundamental principles on forms, advocating cleaner, sharper and on the essentiality of geometrical forms (De Fusco 1985). That is, intuitive and deductive qualities of philosophical rationalism have been reconstituted as an applied design epistemology.

Although rationalism has been considered as the foundation of Modernism and the modernist architectural design style, its limits in design work have been highlighted by some design researchers and practitioners. For instance, Christopher Alexander, who is well known for his rationalist approach during his early works (Alexander 1964), over his career changed his approach to a more pragmatist one (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein 1977). He further distinguished between two oppositional methodological approach, System A and System B. System B is a rational, rigorous, and standardized methodological approach that maximizes cost and other efficiencies at the expense of people’s living, destroying the sense of the place, belonging, and beauty. In contrast, System A is a pragmatist, reflective and situated design approach, which values the uniqueness of life of people and is fundamentally contextual (Alexander, Nies, and Alexander 2012).

Cognitive scientists and HCI scholars Winograd and Flores, who are strongly influenced by their colleague Hubert Dreyfus’ critique of AI, itself relying heavily on Dreyfus’ reading of Heidegger, assert a similar opposition in their well-known argument about human communication with computers. However, instead of appealing to pragmatism, they turn to Heidegger’s account of phenomenology. Winograd and Flores argue that computers can never understand natural human language, because computer programmes are all representations and abstractions based on pre-selected objects, principles and features (Winograd and Flores 1987). Hence, they suggest that those are two opposite worlds, which can never fully be reconciled.

Lucy Suchman, a social scientist and HCI scholar, also influenced by Dreyfus’ readings of Heidegger’s phenomenology, pursues a similar opposition in her book Plans and Situated Actions (Suchman 1987). According to her, plans serve as guidance towards purposeful actions, as a map is an abstraction that supports purposeful actions. In contrast, situated actions are ad hoc and depend on real-time expertise and experiences of a given situation, as in the case of a sailor who makes decisions based on present water currents and wind conditions. On her view, planned and purposeful actions are manifest in concrete situations. Therefore, plans are best viewed as a weak resource for activities that are highly ad hoc in nature – activities such as human–computer interaction.

More recently, in design research and the Research through Design (RtD) community, a pragmatist, experiential and speculative approach has found favour. It often asserts it is in opposition of a systematic and standardized way of designing as it is in design engineering and industrial design. For example, William Gaver writes that the nature of design research outcomes is fundamentally different from a scientific research, and so the design community should avoid attempts towards standardization and theory-oriented generalization (Gaver 2012). Other design scholars have likewise sought to present design as a discipline with its own unique characteristics and epistemologies, set in explicit distinction from other disciplines, such as engineering and humanities (Archer 1979; Cross 2006, 2011; Dorst 1997, 2015; Redström 2017).

We have provided those examples to demonstrate that throughout the HCI and design research literature, rationalism is set into opposition with a preferred alternative epistemology, which is commonly based on pragmatism or phenomenology. Pragmatism and phenomenology are very different philosophical systems, with different histories and analytical strengths, and we by no means conflate them in this work. However, in the HCI and design research, both have been offered as epistemological corrective alternatives of rationalism. We take issue with the opposition itself, and we are not here primarily concerned with the specific contents of pragmatism vs. phenomenology as thought systems. Thus, in the paper we sometimes refer to ‘pragmatism/phenomenology,’ and when we do so, we are not equating their intellectual contents. Rather, we are equating them insofar as each has been offered as an oppositional alternative to rationalism, often while highlighting the same problems with rationalism. HCI and design researchers have, in other words, foregrounded either or both of pragmatist and phenomenological ideas as a tactic to separate design practice from rationalistic fields such as engineering. This move, we believe, is itself pragmatic: design researchers wanted to position design in such a way that it is not forced to conform to normative standards of the natural sciences or engineering. Obviously, we support this objective (Ghajargar and Bardzell 2019).

At the same time, we believe that by and large the design field has been successful in demarcating itself from technical rationality; that is, design is increasingly understood in both research communities (such as ACM SIGCHI) and industry (witness industry’s success marketing ‘design thinking’) as a knowledge practice that is not fundamentally rationalistic in nature. The threats of a ‘design science’ movement (understood in the sense that John Chris Jones, Christopher Alexander, and Buckminster Fuller were pursuing it in the postwar era, and given new life in 1980s HCI research) have receded.

Accordingly, we believe that it is time to reevaluate the roles of rationalism and its alternatives in design research and practice. We certainly do not argue for any return to a rationalistic conception of design or argue here for a ‘design science’; instead, we merely want to reevaluate how rationalistic thinking has contributed to design education and consequently to design research and practice today, in spite of its apparent exile. In prior work, we have argued that the complementarity between rationalism and pragmatism/phenomenology can manifest itself in side-by-side and also serial modes (Ghajargar and Bardzell 2019). We build on that prior research by tracing these complementarities across several schools of design, dating from the Cooper Union to present day.

Technical rationality in design education: four themes

To trace the complementarity between technical rationality and other epistemologies within design pedagogy, we selected nine schools that offered design programmes, and delimited our research within the geographical areas of Europe and the USA. We do not mean to suggest by this any preeminence of Western design education; we limit our scope here mainly because non-Western design schools appropriately have different intellectual genealogies. We studied the histories of the following schools: Cooper Union, Royal College of Arts, Parsons New School, Bauhaus, Institute of Design, Ulm School of Design, Malmö K3, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Indiana University's HCI/d programme. The schools were chosen in hopes of representing different design visions from different eras and locations, and because each had sufficiently available documentation about it to sustain analysis.

In what follows we present four design subjects under which we explicate these technical rationality’s contributions to design pedagogy: a socially progressive and democratized designer-subject; a designer who balances sciences, humanities, arts, and/or technology; the designer as scientist or researcher; and finally, the designer as an entrepreneur. We found out that even though technical rationality has been always present, the specific entanglements between technical rationality and other epistemologies are quite diverse. Further, the themes are based on the manners that the technical rationality and other epistemologies in design education have been integrated, productively, creating a coherent programme. We offer those themes as our own critical interpretation of the results of schools’ practices integrating different disciplines and corresponding epistemological paradigms.

By the themes presented in the next section, we do not mean to create an exhaustive list of epistemological entanglements of technical rationality with other epistemologies in design education history. Instead, we consider those themes as thought exercises to think about and re-evaluate the relationships between technical rationality and other epistemologies, and hence design relationships with other disciplines. And, as one might expect, themes and schools criss-cross and overlap in dynamic ways, but as a matter of rhetorical structuring, what we have done is to feature one or two schools as primary exemplars of each theme, so that each school is featured at least once and each theme is exemplified by at least one school. Noteworthy instances where non-featured schools contribute to a theme are so noted.

The socially progressive subject

Throughout the history of design education, we can find examples of design schools that sought to construct a socially useful and active design through their educational programmes and visions that are enabled by technical rationality. Hence, an important example of technical rationality, which is in support of emancipatory social agendas, can be traced in Cooper Union efforts to make a tuition-free design school, with open door policies and a commitment to women empowerment, happen. Similarly, it can be found in Parsons New School’s socially active, cross-disciplinary, problem-oriented and critical programme, enabled by crossing borders of disciplines, including those pertaining to technical rationality.

New York school of design for women (1852–59), Cooper Union (1859–present)

One of the first examples of such relationship, as stated above, is the Cooper Union’s policy to welcome students, regardless of race, gender, or economic class, which was greatly facilitated by its not charging tuition and open-door policies. Cooper Union began as the New York School of Design for Women, offering courses in mechanical philosophy, mechanical drawings and designing for paper, cotton and woollen manufactures (Walls 1994, 2001). Later on, in 1859, Peter Cooper, an inventor, politician and philanthropist, founded The Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art. Cooper had progressive social views and believed in a new American model of higher education, which would not only be technologically advanced but also accessible to all people, independent of their race, religion, gender, and wealth (Davis 2017).

The Cooper Union mission was to advance design by integrating sciences and arts towards a socially useful and accessible design. Cooper had planned for a democratic and student-centric institution:

I desire that the students of this institution may have the privilege to occupy one of the large halls once in every month, for the purpose of a lecture to be delivered by one of their number to all students and such friends as they may think proper to invite. The monthly lecture shall be chosen from the body of the students by the majority vote, or a committee of the students selected for that purpose. […] A president and secretary shall be chosen from the body of students by a majority vote, who shall preside at all meetings for lectures or other purposes, and whose term of service shall expire every three months, when another president and secretary shall be elected to take their places. (Art & Cooper 1859, 30)

The instruction shall be adapted to the comprehension and improvement of the mechanics and mechanics’ apprentices, with the intention of bridging the gap between science and the practical occupations of life, including art of design (Art & Cooper 1859, 51).

The school aimed to teach design skills to women, to help them to become independent by securing jobs in industry or schools, which represents Cooper Union’s commitments to gender inclusivity and women empowerment. That was achieved by teaching courses in mechanical philosophy, mechanical drawings, chemistry, among others, all pertaining to technical rationality. Its aim to attract more women to the school was fostered by assigning management roles to women and it was evident in the structure of its advisory council which was composed of thirteen women. Cooper Union stands as a forerunner of what we today call socially responsible design. And Victor Papanek, one of the pioneers of social design, graduated from Cooper Union in 1948 with a degree in Architecture and Industrial Design. His works on socially responsible design is a main reference for design scholars and practitioners since 1971, the publication date of first edition of his book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (Papanek 2005).

Further, it seems to be no coincidence that Cooper Union’s epistemological openness – synthesizing technical rationality and progressivist pragmastism – and sociological inclusivity are mutually reinforcing. It also lends evidence to the idea that inclusivity goals can be undermined by epistemological narrowness – an ongoing challenge in certain HCI-relevant disciplines than others. Put more concretely, any field that fails to take seriously epistemological commitments shared by many women (e.g. feminism), LGBT individuals (e.g. queer theory), or people from formerly colonized regions (e.g. postcolonialism) might struggle to recruit and retain such individuals. Accepting historically marginalized populations appears to benefit from accepting epistemologically marginalized thought systems.

Parsons (1904–1970), The New School (1919–present), Parsons School of Design (1970–present)

Parsons School of Design was founded in 1970 in New York, and its history is entangled with the history of both Parsons and New School, and how social research merged with artistic and design skills to jointly address societal issues. In 1904, art educator Frank Alvah Parsons, founded Parsons, a progressive art school. Parsons believed that ‘Art should not be for the few, for the talented, for the genius, for the rich, nor the church, but for the benefit of the whole society’ (Parsons 1911, 1913).

The New School, initially called The New School for Social Research, was founded in 1919 by historian Charles Beard, philosopher John Dewey, historian James Harvey Robinson, and economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. The group of progressive thinkers set out to create a new kind of university, where people could freely, honestly, and directly debate twentieth century social problems. Its vision was based on an open curriculum, minimal hierarchy, and free discussion of controversial ideas. The general purpose of The New School stated in an announcement published in 1920 clearly reflects the supports it sought from technical rationality to address societal issues. As an institution it aimed to carry on research with a view of increasing our knowledge of human nature and social institutions to establish and measure social facts, to create in students a scientific attitude toward present political, social, and economic problems, (The New School for Social Research. Announcement 1920–1921).

The structures of the courses did not often follow the usual departmental headings – e.g. political economy, sociology, design, etc. Instead, each course was organized around a topic of inquiry and included economic, political, anthropological data as appropriate for a given inquiry. The New School philosophy was against such a silo-based division between knowledge fields, believing that they obscure the interrelationships between human activities, rendering each insufficient to confront societal and organizational problems (The New School for Social Research 1920, 5). A total of 55 single courses were offered in 1920, including Welman’s labour statistics, Adam’s federal taxation, Ellis’s creative intelligence and Dewey’s methods in social sciences.

Parsons New School of Design took advantage of the environment and the rich programme and history of The New School, including Karen Harney and Erich Fromm’s courses in psychoanalysis, in 1940; Margaret Mead’s anthropology (1954–1987); and Gerda Lerner’s women’s history in 1962. It was the first American university to teach the history of photography, Jazz, women’s history, African-American history, and cinema. In 1933, in line with the social and political agendas of the school, The New School for Social Research created a graduate school of political and social science for scholars who fled the Nazis, called University in Exile. Hannah Arendt, sociologist, philosopher and political scientist, joined that graduate school, who in 1968, became a professor of philosophy in The New School. In 1975, America’s first master’s programme in media studies was launched by John Culkin. The Parsons School of Design offered degrees in fashion design, interior design, and lighting design for the first time in USA. The programmes included either theoretical or practical aspects of design, such as design fundamentals, design philosophy, presentation techniques, technical drawings, African art, and history of decorative arts, etc. (The Parsons New School 1976).

Yet within this curriculum, technical rationality nonetheless found its place even in the early days: in Dewey’s social sciences methodology course and in several practical workshops, such as interior design, lighting design, etc. And since 1970, technical rationality became even more emphasized, for instance in the science for citizens programme (e.g. physics and biology); mathematics programme (e.g. computer mathematics, game theory, and calculus); computer language systems, (e.g. COBOL and Fortran programming); and design (e.g. environmental design principles – human factors and ergonomics – mechanicals and paste-ups) (The Parsons New School 1970, 106, 109, 222, 227). As with Cooper Union, Parsons New School integrated technical rationality in service of a progressive and emancipatory agenda.

Malmö Högskola, K3 (1998–2019), Malmö University, K3 (2019–present)

K3 or, the school of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in Sweden, was established in 1998 by Pelle Ehn and Inger Lindstedt. Its initial vision was to unite democracy, art, and ethics with technology and natural sciences to implement the vision of creative and socially useful digital design, hence a Digital Bauhaus school with a strong emphasis on ‘software as codes of values, aesthetic ideals, ethics and politics’ (Ehn 1998, 209). The Digital Bauhaus put also strong emphasis on deep understanding of people lives, in particular their experiences, instead of following a technology driven approach in designing mediating technologies – carrying forward earlier traditions of human-centred design.

The school’s vision and philosophy has been influenced by philosophers Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Marx, Dewey and Schön. According to Pelle Ehn, the school was influenced mainly by Dewey, his pragmatist and experience centred design philosophy, and Schön’s reflective practicum and tacit knowledge, themselves inspired by Dewey’s work. But this Deweyan framework is further shaped by a mixture of Marx’s socialist and interventionist political philosophy, Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy, and Wittgenstein’s language philosophy. The teaching philosophy is based on problem-based learning, taking stances considering humanistic heritages, ideas on freedom, democracy and human dignity, not only by studying cultural and political theories, but also by going through practical dialogues with people in the surrounding society. It sees itself as a Scandinavian approach to design that unites a democratic perspective on user participation, to design useful products and experiences for ordinary people.

K3 seeks to integrate arts, philosophy, technology and democracy to create a participatory democratic design (Ehn 2017; Ehn, Farías, and Criado 2018) that emphasizes value-based mind set in design with a strong political commitment and a sensibility towards society. It re-shaped itself over time to offer new forms of democratic design such as participatory design inspired by feminist technoscience and participatory design inspired by sustainable developments and the sharing economy (Binder, Löwgren, and Malmborg 2008; Ehn 1998; Ehn and Malmborg 1998). K3, advocates a participatory democratic design which roots back in Scandinavian participatory design tradition, an epistemology linked to a regionally distinctive conception of democracy. Given that Scandinavian participatory design was largely developed by computer scientists in the 1970s, its connections to technical rationality are deep and not in any discernible conflict with its connections to commitments to democracy and social justice.

Summary

Technical rationality has played a supportive role in enabling pragmatist agendas focused on progressive values of social equity, social democracy, social responsibility and social empowerment. Under this theme, we reported specific entanglements that led to the socially responsible design and design that foster social empowerments in Cooper Union; and other entanglements leading to a critical and socially active design in Parsons New School, enabled through creating a scientific attitude toward present political, social, and economic problems. Further in Malmö K3’s social democratic design, the technical rationality of computing sciences is the stage on which participatory, feminist, and democratic ideals play out, achieving a balance that is characteristic of another significant thread of design education, to which we now turn.

The non-Existent collaborator

When architect Walter Gropius was tapped to head the Bauhaus in 1919, he wanted to integrate what he saw as two separate professional roles: that of the imaginative designer and that of the technically proficient craftsman. He hoped to find – or to create – a new and, he believed, nonexistent type of collaborator, who is proficient equally in both roles (Dearstyne 1986, 47). That integration of epistemological paradigms – in which creative imagination and technical proficiency are set ‘side-by-side’ (Ghajargar and Bardzell 2019) – would come to characterize an enduring understanding of the professional designer.

Bauhaus school of design (Weimar 1919–1925, Dessau 1925–1932, Berlin 1932–1933)

In 1919, Architect Walter Gropius, a former designer at the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) was hired by the “Weimar government to head two existing and struggling schools at Weimar, Germany – Weimar School of Art and Craft and the Wiemar Academy of Fine Arts – under a single name, Staatliches Bauhaus (State School of Building). “Weimar had the title of the “poets city”, as Goethe (1775), among other poets and philosophers, had lived in that city (Dearstyne 1986).”

The Bauhaus school of design was a response to specific struggles of that time, and its history is fraught with political and intellectual tensions. One such tension was the struggle with the management of the earlier Weimar schools, which had an intellectual dimension to it in the form of Gropius’ critique of what he saw to be an overly rigid and commercial interpretation of design at Werkbund (Donoso, Mirauda, and Jacob 2018). Tensions continued when the Weimar-Bauhaus school was accused of Communist tendencies by right-wing conservatives in the government and was closed in 1924. After the school closing in Weimar, the Dessau municipality expressed its interest to support that school and its re-opening in that city. In 1930 a Communist group of students attracted the attention of the right-wing press in Dessau and so the mayor called for its director’s dismissal; consequently, all students signed a letter that prohibited them to take roles in any political activity. In 1931, however, the Nazi party (National Socialist German Workers Party) forced the school to close permanently (Droste 2006). Mies van der Rohe, one of the Bauhaus teachers, rented an old factory in Berlin, renovated by the aid of students, and lunched a new programme in 1932. The Gestapo closed that school in 1933, as the Nazis believed that school was ‘un-German,’ too modern in its philosophy, was Communist and influenced by foreign radicals (Cross 1983; Davis 2017).

As far as its pedagogical content itself, the original course plan at Bauhaus included a first year completely dedicated to basic courses, which were focused on the introductory study of materials, tools, colours, composition and space. From year two forward, students choose among specializing workshops of wood, clay, glass, stone, textile and metal. A strong emphasis was put on mastery of material and craftsmanship; however, a study of theory and history were lacking and that was criticized by the school’s Council of Masters extensively (Davis 2017). Another disagreement had to do with the proper relationship between design and industry. Gropius believed in a direct collaboration with industry and local production; his colleague painter Johannes Itten, however, wanted more emphasis on students’ spiritual and personal development. These tensions resulted to the resignation of Itten after a first engagement of students in commissions. Gropius believed that engagement of students in paid commissions would benefit the school as it would lessen the school dependency on public subsidies and government funding (Davis 2017; Droste 2006). The commissions would continue in workshops and the introductory course under the coordination of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. Architecture and Advertising were added to the curriculum in Dessau in 1926 under the direction of Hannes Meyer, supported by various workshops – e.g. in metals, textiles, joinery, sculpture, and photography.

The various incarnations of the Bauhaus tested different balances of the commercial vs. artistic, and the creative and technical. Part of what gives the school its sense of identity in spite of all of its changes are its ongoing commitment to a holistic designer and its use of craft-oriented workshops. In its pursuit of this unity of apparent opposites, the Bauhaus has affinities to the integration of technical rationality and progressive pragmatism of the early American design schools. Yet what science was part of the Bauhaus was hands-on; theorizing, systematic reasoning, the construction and validation of methods and so on fell outside of its purview. When the Bauhaus moved to America, technical rationality would take on a greater role.

New Bauhaus (1937–1938), Chicago school of design (1939–1944), Institute of design (1944–present)

The New Bauhaus was founded by Lászaló Moholy-Nagy, a former Bauhaus teacher, in 1937 in Chicago. Its initial vision was based on a practice-oriented teaching, featuring a unification of arts, sciences and technology. Its vision was to put human as a whole at the centre of design activities – a forerunner of today’s human-centred design. Therefore, as a process-oriented approach, as Moholy-Nagy stated the purpose or the end in view was not the product but human as a whole:

Thus we lay the organic basis for a system of production whose focal point is man (human), and not profit interests. (Moholy-Nagy 1938)

In 1938, Moholy-Nagy had to close the school because Elkan Powell, the president of the Association, was no longer able to extend the school’s funding. He then re-opened the school in 1939, sponsored by Alfred Barr, John Dewey, Julian Huxley and Walter Gropius (Findeli and Benton 1991). The economic situation of the school, however, remained precarious, which limited the number of students, relied on unsalaried teachers, and shaped the school as a ‘communal studio’. In 1940 the situation worsened with the entry of United States to the war, at which point many students and teachers left to apply their design skills to support the army (Findeli and Benton 1991, 100). Even so, the school would survive and in 1944 would be renamed the Institute of Design, later joining the Illinois Institute of Technology, where it remains today.

The structure of the programme was similar to the Bauhaus model. It required students to study first a pre-requisite one-year course on foundations, aiming to introduce to students the plastic elements of design – line, shape, colour, etc. – and their relations to design tools and materials – wood, clay, light, etc. The main emphasis was on the process rather than the product (Moholy-Nagy 1947). Then, students choose one of the three-year specialized workshops, light, product design, modelling, colour, stage, weaving, and architecture, which in 1946 they converged to four workshops, product design, graphic design, photography and film, and architecture (Findeli 1990; Moholy-Nagy 1938). Later, the architecture workshop disappeared from the programme, as it became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).

The Bauhaus model then had to be adapted to both the North American context and also to a rapidly changing technological environment. As a result, natural sciences and technological components were added to the artistic courses, hence programmes such as photography and film have been introduced (Findeli 1990). In the ID, the integration between other epistemologies and technical rationality did not happen only among arts, technology and sciences, but also between the vocational and humanistic approach of education (Findeli 1990). These productive tensions, which were pushed by the post-industrial and economic conditions that emerged after the United States entered into the war, led to a side-by-side integration and a relationship between two oppositional poles of commerce and culture, which Allen (2002) claims shaped ID into an industrial art school (Allen 2002).

HCI/d, school of informatics, computing and engineering, Indiana University Bloomington (2000–present)

HCI/d was founded as part of then new School of Informatics (later: School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering) at Indiana University, in 2000. Its founding director was Andrew Dillon, who envisioned a degree in the scientific field of HCI (human–computer interaction) but soon departed Indiana University. The early years of the programme were led by educational psychologist Martin Siegel and computer scientist and design researcher Eli Blevis. The vision was to blend the research rigour prevalent in HCI with the creative culture and social commitments of design into a single programme. Each contributed one of the two defining features of the programme: Siegel contributed its cohort culture, which encouraged risk-taking and cooperation rather than competition among students, while Blevis developed much of the content of the design-oriented HCI curriculum.

Blevis, who prior to joining the school had been a faculty member at the Institute of Design, modelled the early curriculum on that of the ID. In this sense, HCI/d traces its lineage back to the Bauhaus through the New Bauhaus, a lineage reinforced when ID Ph.D. graduate Youn-Kyung Lim joined the faculty for several years. Alongside of more traditional courses, HCI/d uses a design studio-based pedagogy as part of its core, which harkens back to the workshops of the Bauhaus. A series of back-to-back hires would further define the programme: design theorist Erik Stolterman was hired from Umeå University to lead the programme in 2005, while critical scholars Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell joined in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Building on the programme’s ID-inspired design focus, the three deepened the programme’s emphasis on theory, while developing foci on criticality, feminism, and philosophy. In spite of their different academic and geographic backgrounds, HCI/d converged on a studio-driven holistic approach to design tying back to the Bauhaus, with emancipatory and progressive values linking it to its American pragmatist precursors in Cooper Union and Parsons.

Although it features undergraduate and Ph.D. programmes, the core of HCI/d has been its professional Master of Science programme, which integrates technical rationality and other epistemologies in a side-by-side manner. IU HCI/d’s first year, features introductory courses on applied design thinking, design methods, and the history and foundations of HCI/d taught side-by-side with studio-based courses using design challenge-based learning (Blevis 2010). With its interdisciplinary faculty, it is not surprising that HCI/d embraces a transdisciplinary approach to design education (Blevis et al. 2015). Courses such as experience design, design theory, and even prototyping liberally incorporate literary theory, philosophy, and cultural theory to train designers to critique both interactive systems and core concepts in the field (e.g. ‘the user’) as well as to develop their own personal philosophies of design (J. Bardzell 2009, 2011; Nelson and Stolterman 2012). Its design methods course has been deeply shaped by feminist social science and feminist HCI, emphasizing democracy and co-design (Bardzell 2010). A commitment to social values – social justice, environmental sustainability, and political economy – runs throughout the programme. Art-based methods such as speculative design and design fictions are also taught along with design ethnography.

Yet technical rationality plays an important role. The programme recognizes that design products are increasingly intangible – interactions, experiences, and services – and thus the materials of design have changed (Wiberg 2018). The programme uses models to structure students’ development of such intangibles: task models, interaction flows, journey maps, service blueprints, and the like are constructed from empirical research and user data – all of this is shaped by technical rationality. Yet the modelling is also informed by more critical approaches, including Deweyan notions of aesthetic experience, auto-ethnographic and other reflexive methods, feminist social science, co-design methods and creative writing – fulfilling the critical and emancipatory goals of the programme, in hopes of bringing the models – and design outcomes – to life. Programme outcomes emphasize the development of design arguments as much as design products themselves. Students are expected to use visual storytelling techniques to justify their processes, link their design decisions to data points and design exemplars, and demonstrate how value is created across a wide range of stakeholders.

Summary

The aspiration of the designer to constitute a ‘unified’ or whole person can be interpreted in part as a counterweight to pressures towards endless specialization, e.g. in Fordist manufacturing. Throughout the variations of the Bauhaus and through HCI and design schools today – typified by HCI/d and many others – one finds the integration of seemingly opposing paradigms of knowledge production and professional practice. It is this integration that forms the basis of the unified or whole designer, and this is why we believe that technical rationality has always been present and always will be present in design, even if (as in the Bauhaus) sometimes implicitly. In the 1920s, the integration was between the arts and technical crafts; in the 2020s, we believe (and certainly hope) that the integration will feature technology (e.g. computer science, informatics) and the humanities as joint drivers of humane innovation, of technical creativity in service of values such as respect and the sustaining of life (Wei et al. 2019).

The scientist / researcher

Like many other fields in the twentieth century, design has been concerned with intellectual legitimation, both in improving its rigour and also its ability to demonstrate and evaluate design rigour. Oftentimes, this search has led to the sciences: scientific methods, systematic methods, analytic approaches, and so forth – all manifestations of technical rationality – as offering models of intellectual rigour. In design theory, evidence of this movement is visible in John Chris Jones (1992), Herb Simon (1996), Christopher Alexander (1964), and others. Such trends also influenced design education, where schools sought to build and defend design epistemology by borrowing rigour and learning from, technical rationality. Schools featured in this theme are the Ulm School of Design and, in a different way, the Royal College of Arts’ Design Research initiative.

Royal College of Arts (1863–present)

In many ways, the RCA went in the opposite direction as Ulm, at least on its surface turning away from science in an effort to develop design itself into a rigorous intellectual discipline. Yet we will argue that in doing so, RCA shares easily overlooked affinities with Ulm.

The Royal College of Arts (RCA), was founded in 1863 as a centre for design and art training, under the name of Government School of Design. In 1897, it was renamed to Royal College of Arts and was identified as a place ‘to train art teachers of both sexes, designers and art workmen.’ In 1911, The school received criticism from a departmental committee for not being suitable for teachers of ‘art in more industrial sense.’ (Cunliffe-Charlesworth 1991, 12). In response to that criticism, and in line with the philosophy of Arts and Crafts movement, in 1912 the Board of Education introduced new rules and requirements for entry to that school, such as necessary skills in drawings and having passed courses on methodology, and demonstrated good understanding of the relationship between education, society, and industry (Cunliffe-Charlesworth 1991, 13).

Lethaby, who was a professor in design at RCA, distinguished between design educators and design practitioners: whereas the former group ‘study the study of design,’ the latter ‘study design’ and produce ‘beautiful commodities.’ He further encouraged the inclusion of craft and practical skills, as vital elements in an industrialized society, in addition to the study of history and nature for inspiration (Cunliffe-Charlesworth 1991; Frayling 1987). In 1920, after the appointment of Rothenstein, the emphasis changed. He believed that only those who are talented designers and artists could become proficient teachers. Henry Moore, the sculptor, then a student at RCA, described the effect of the new principal:

he changed the College completely. It used to be a place where teachers taught teachers who became teachers and taught teachers, rather you know like a snake eating its own tail. Rothenstein was horrified “What arrogance,” he used to say to people who wanted to just become art teachers, “how can you presume to want to teach what you don't know?” (Cunliffe-Charlesworth 1991, 17)

After 1950, many graduates of RCA worked not only as teachers but also as design practitioners. But until then, craft and fine arts were the main focus for teaching, hence teachers and graduates were called artists rather than designers (Cunliffe-Charlesworth 1991).

Originating from the Arts and Craft tradition, RCA’s initial focus was on an art-oriented design, instead of seeing design as a problem-solving activity. It rejected pure functionalism as the philosophy of design and advocated design and art as activities that can generate knowledge and that are inquiry-driven, if not specifically (or narrowly) scientific – which led to the concept of ‘design awareness’, as an area analogous to literacy and numeracy (Archer, Baynes, and Roberts 2005, 16).

Until 1920, there were four different areas of the core curriculum: architecture; ornament and design; decorative painting; and sculpture and modelling. From 1921, following the arrival of Rothenstein as the principal, two craft workshops were introduced, etching and engraving. The School of Design emphasized an understanding of design styles and craft skills, rather than training designers for mass production, a curricular emphasis that would be criticized by local industry. In 1920, industrial design teaching started, and in 1922, a strong division created between fine arts and craft and three separate schools for painting, sculpture and design, whereas the design school had a majority of female students who were taught craft subjects mainly. The Design School kept reflecting the idea that even functional crafts should remain art and concerned about teaching the history of styles and creating three dimensional models from two dimensional patterns.

Although technical rationality and natural sciences contributed as fundamental ingredients of design and art education at RCA and specifically to Archer’s design research department, the school’s highly influential argument was that the arts have research traditions that are equivalent to, but not reducible to, those of the sciences. Bruce Archer proposed ‘design as the missing segment of education to be placed alongside sciences and humanities’ and although he borrowed teaching materials from both sciences (e.g. ergonomics) and humanities (e.g. history), he advocated a third area in education, that is design education, distinct from humanities and sciences (Archer 1987). But it was perhaps his intent to differentiate design from sciences and humanities and not from the arts. He proposed that if we delimit an area of education that concerns about material culture, and exclude all those areas that belong to science (e.g. material science) and humanities (e.g. history and philosophy), what is left is the artefact itself, the skill and experience that go into its production and use, and that belongs to design (Archer 1987, 5; Archer, Baynes, and Roberts 2005, 11).

Particularly significant today, though, is RCA’s role in advocating design research as such: Research through Design (RtD), though it was initially referred to as ‘research through art and design’ (Bardzell, Bardzell, and Koefoed Hansen 2015; Frayling 1993). Research through art and design manifests as a project ‘where a research diary tells, in a step-by-step way, of a practical experiment in the studios, and the resulting report aims to contextualize it. Both the diary and the report are there to communicate the results,’ and that presentation of results is what makes it ‘research’ (Frayling 1993, 5). Research through design, then, was primarily ‘research’ and only secondarily or instrumentally design (hence: ‘through’). Further, in its presentation of its own ‘experiments’ and ‘results,’ research through design takes on more than a whiff of science – one that has been challenged (Gaver 2012) and yet has persisted. And further, although Frayling exhibited ambivalence about research’s prestige (‘True, research has become a political or resource issue, as much as an academic one. […] Research has become a status issue, as much as a conceptual or even practical one’), research through design today within HCI at least has acquired at least some of its prestige by making itself legible to the scientific discipline of HCI. In short, even in attempting to establish itself as part of a third area beyond the sciences and humanities, research through art and design remains even today complexly entangled with both. Key to its entanglement with science, and with-it technical rationality, is its turn to scientific conceptual vocabulary (systematic research, experiment, results, reports, generalized knowledge) at the very moment of its inception.

Ulm school of design (1953–1968)

The Ulm school of design was founded by Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl, and Max Bill after World War II in Germany. A private school of design, it did not accept funding from government and municipal entities, and was launched using donations received from two Americans, John McCloy, a US High Commissioner for Occupied Germany, and journalist Shepard Stone, who was the director of Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies in Berlin (Lindinger 1991).

The school’s philosophy has changed as it went under different directors. In its early years, co-founder Max Bill introduced an arts-oriented curriculum, though it did feature courses on mathematics and geometry. From 1960, however, the school focused more on abstract methodologies, semiotics and mutual criticism in the classroom (Lindinger 1991, 33–34). Aicher and Maldonado, new directors, advocated for departing from the craft-based curriculum of the Bauhaus in favour of science and analytical studies. Under the direction of Tomas Maldonado, the school curriculum changed to a more theoretical based design, and sought to strengthen the connections among design, sciences, and technical skills (Aicher 2015, 85; Davis 2017), which led to a tension among designers and scientists who criticized its overly positivist approach. Aicher took over as rector in 1962 and sought to rebalance theory and practice (Aicher 2015; Davis 2017) and the school developed strong collaborations with local industry, such as Braun, Lufthansa, and Kodak. The integration of chemical engineering and material sciences and composites of natural and synthetic materials – known as sandwich materials – were used for the first time, and such materials led to the design of pre-fabricated, modular components for buildings. This is a significant design contribution of technical rationality within the Ulm school of design (Jacob 1988).

The faculty included both designers and scientists, including some former Bauhaus instructors. The Ulm school offered a design programme specializing in socially responsible design through the application of a rational and rigorous design process. It challenged the modernist assumption that design problems could be solved just by the properties of the object and its functionalities. Therefore, it proposed a model of design that demanded a careful study of the context and methods that reflected an objective perspective, embracing a systems and relational approach (Wingler 1978). Systems thinking theory and methods not only influenced the philosophy and theoretical approach of the Ulm school, but they were also practiced and seen in many objects that were designed in the school – for instance, the seating system designed by Hans Gugelot; appliances designed by Dieter Rams for Braun; the study of sign systems by Maldonado, Aicher and Bonsiepe; and modular system design in architecture. The Ulm school also introduced the science of signs and semiotics in design education, helping to establish communication design as a new emerging field of design (Davis 2017; Maldonado 1974). The school’s pursuit of a rational methodology, systems thinking, social responsibility, an unprejudiced and careful study of the context of the problem, and objective evaluation and analysis and operational research led to important contributions in contextual design, systemic design, and scientific design (Rittel and Webber 1973).

While Ulm is perhaps the best example of a design school turning to the sciences to strengthen its own epistemic legitimacy, it is not alone. Illinois’ Institute of Design (ID) also introduced science as a third component to the art and technology in design pedagogy. It introduced scientific design, as a result of dynamic relationships between art and science – instead of between art and technology as originally ideated at Bauhaus – relationships that were to be revealed and materialized through technology. The move allowed scientific theories and methods to support design pedagogy and practice while introducing curricular changes. For example, the previously separate light and colour workshops were unified and turned into graphic design, in 1946. Hence, from Moholy-Nagy’s perspective, form does not only follow function – Sullivan’s functionalism – but form should also follow existing technical, scientific, sociological and economic developments (Moholy-Nagy 1947). He then introduced a new kind of functionalism, called organic functionalism, going beyond the materialistic vision of Bauhaus model. The ID also would engage biotech as a ‘valuable art of adapting natural structures and processes’ to technical artifacts. This development is a forerunner to the design practice today called biomimicry, with precursors in Goethe’s Naturphilosophie and Dewey’s pragmatism (Findeli 1990).

Summary

Among its many achievements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science developed standards, criteria, and rhetorical norms of rigour, all of which contributed to its intellectual prestige. Pursuing intellectual improvement and prestige alike, design has turned to the sciences, borrowing liberally from technical rationality even as it sought to position itself as a ‘third domain, neither humanities nor science.’ Two main examples among those we described above are the rational and systems approach to design education and methodology which is seen in Ulm School of Design and the RCA’s efforts to position design as a research discipline. Ulm’s specific purpose in advancing socially responsible design, through rationality and efficiency showed that it borrowed a kind of rigour associated with technical rationality, while RCA’s understanding of ‘research’ itself leaned heavily on technical rationality (intentionally or not). Whether design has – or even should have – a firm position distinct from the sciences and humanities, Ulm’s and RCA’s respective agendas nonetheless enriched the relations between scientific and designerly ways of knowing. Their success is manifest in similar integrations in today’s design schools, from ID’s application of biotech as a ‘valuable art of adapting natural structures and processes’ to the proliferation of research through design and related practices in design programmes all over the world.

The entrepreneur

Since the neo-liberal turn in the 1980s, industry goals, career pathways, and understandings of creativity itself have been tied to entrepreneurial concepts of innovation. That is, innovation – whether in global conglomerates or actual start-ups – unfolds as if in a start-up, with a small, agile team quickly able to develop, market, and test ideas in rapid iterations and precarious financial circumstances, with (supposedly) high reward potentials. We have seen throughout our genealogy how design has variously engaged with industry and commercial interests on the one hand, and art and/or social justice agendas on the other. In the past few decades, engaging with commercial interests is linked to entrepreneurial attitudes of innovation, and in so doing introduces a different configuration of technical rationality and pragmatism. We focus in this section on Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which developed this particular conception of design in the early 2000s.

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (2000–2005)

The IDII’s vision is on educating the designer-entrepreneur, whose facility with designing and business modelling also resonates well with the side-by-side integration of technical rationality with alternative epistemologies. The IDII was a non-profit institution founded in 2000 and it aimed to support and to carry out activities for local technological, cultural and business developments – mostly Italian, but mainly focused on Piemonte’s region. It was significantly funded by an Italian telco company, Telecom Italia and supported by Olivetti.

IDII offered a two-year master programme in interaction design. The first year was mainly focused on the basics of interaction – again influenced by Bauhaus – and year two was based on projects and explorations. Year one used to start with an introductory week followed by a crash course on design methods, and a practical design project. Students worked with practitioners from industry, such as IDEO, Hitachi, Sony, and Whirlpool. Then they had a week long lectures on philosophy, photographic composition, and the physiology of vision; a week on sound and its physical and psycho-acoustic qualities; a week on user research, main methods, processes and tools such as experience modelling, user experience assessment and participatory design (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, The Masters Course 2001, 20). The following week was dedicated to travel in Italy and explore the entrepreneurial opportunities of Italy. Then a reflection week allowed students to look back and reflect on their projects and experiences and write about their learnings.

The second year featured three key parts, two practical thematic design projects and one study trip. Before starting the project, students had to attend seminars on various topics – e.g. design, technology, economy, history, and current trends and the attention was focused on both the functionality and aesthetics of the products. The second project was mainly focused on a specific technology and its applications in design (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, The Masters Course 2001, 20–25). Students and faculty came from a variety of backgrounds such as, art and design, computer science and electronics, social sciences and humanities and from different countries. Bill Verplank, John Maeda, and Bill Moggridge were among its faculty members.

Its founder and director Gillian Crampton Smith – previously Head of the department of Computer Related Design (CRD) at Royal College of Arts – describes the institute as a place that aimed to teach the ‘art’ of business modelling to the future designers in addition to design and technology (“The Interaction Design IVREA Association,” 2001):

Our products will be people: innovators capable of developing new concepts, skills, and business models; and ideas about how to design products and services that are culturally desirable, technically feasible, and economically viable.

This idea of people as a ‘product’ of education echoes issues raised in other programmes, including Cooper Union’s goal of producing more designers from hitherto marginalized social groups, including women and the poor, the RCA’s debate about whether the programme should produce design practitioners or design educators, and the Bauhaus’s holistic designer. With IDII, the conception of the designer as ‘innovator’ and ‘entrepreneur’ offers a neoliberal view of the designer as a social actor. The designer as innovator of products and services for businesses. The technical and business practices were informed by technical rationality, while the study of history regarding technological development, user research and contextual research were informed by pragmatism and phenomenology, which worked side-by-side to achieve a single objective – that of innovation and that of educating designers as innovators. The focus on entrepreneurship among faculty and students of the school helped them to achieve impact not only with consumers, but also internally within industry organizations, including their own startups (e.g. Arduino, Wiring, Processing) (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, The Masters Course 2001.)

Discussion

We hope to have demonstrated that within the history of design education, technical rationality is not only omnipresent – manifested in variations appropriate both to the historical and geographic situation of each given design programme as well as its pedagogical vision – but that its relationship with alternative epistemologies, notably pragmatism and phenomenology – is highly productive. One question is why technical rationality appears to have been deprecated in, if not exiled from, design theory.

A way into that question is to consider that two foundational works of design theory – Rittel and Webber’s paper on wicked problems and Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner – start with the same argument: that there is a ‘crisis’ in public perceptions of professional expertise. Both attribute that crisis to failures in policymaking, education, and related fields, and both attribute those failures to a blind faith in science, that is, a scientism that offered false promises about how to address complex social problems. Similar critiques can be found throughout design, AI, and HCI around the same time. It should not be surprising, in the context of such critiques, that theorists would express the relationship between science’s technical rationality and pragmatism (or plans vs. situated actions, rationalism vs. phenomenology, or modern vs. postmodern) as oppositional, and to align design with the latter.

But we are also no longer in the 1970s and 80s, and even if fields like HCI do still manifest scientist and positivistic values, it seems clear enough that design has enjoyed success in establishing for itself as a field epistemically distinct from engineering and natural sciences. Those who decades ago pushed for scientizing design – Herbert Simon, John Chris Jones, Christopher Alexander – later backed away from those agendas. In the meantime, scientific studies of designers, for instance in the collective works of Nigel Cross, Bryan Lawson, Kees Dorst, and others, has clearly demarcated design from natural sciences and the humanities. Further, design’s distinction from scientific ways of knowing can be seen within organizational structures, including ACM CHI’s design subcommittee, and many design-oriented conferences, including ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Design Research Society, and similar conferences, as well as design-oriented HCI departments within technology schools (Indiana being one of many). Finally, it can be seen in the ways ‘design thinking’ became a global buzzword in the past ten years. Without denying that design’s relationships to other disciplines and knowledge practices remains dynamic and often problematic, it seems fair nonetheless to say that it is time for design theorists to move past an oppositional view between technical rationality and pragmatism/phenomenology towards a more nuanced view. We turned to design education in large part because it has synthesized technical rationality, pragmatism, and phenomenology all along, albeit with considerable variations.

Our research has helped us to see the ongoing influence of technical rationality in design. It manifests itself in several ways. One is that technical rationality is tied to many individual methods of user research and creating design representations. For the former, for example, standards of sampling, statistical inference, and so on apply to questionnaire-based user research; standards are equally imposed on design work that calls itself ethnographic, contextual, interview-based, etc. For the latter, technical drawing and modelling have been mainstays of design education for generations, with contemporary manifestations in software ranging from 3D modelling and CAD to wireframing. Materials sciences, cognitive science, business management, computer science, and other rationalistic fields remain fundamental to contemporary design practice. Likewise, models of all sorts are commonplace in design practice: business models and forecasts, users’ cognitive models, personas (as a kind of data model), simulations, and data sciences in decision-making.

None of this means that design practice can be reduced to instrumental disciplines, nor does it deny the force of design theorists’ arguments about what makes problems ‘wicked,’ or why no account of ‘problem-solving’ can explain ‘problem setting.’ Acts of creativity – expressed in stories such as Philip Starck’s experience ordering squid pasta helping to inspire his famous juicer – are also difficult to explain in terms of technical rationality. Even so, in design pedagogy, if not in design theory, technical rationality and pragmatism and phenomenology coexist in a synthesis at the very heart of teaching and learning.

Moreover, our study has shown that the coexistence of technical rationality and alternative epistemic stances has been productive, even politically powerful. Our study has shown how the specific ways that design schools have synthesized technical rationality and pragmatism/ phenomenology in given times and places have given rise to design subjectivities and corresponding design subdisciplines appropriate to those moments but also enduring beyond them: social design, communications design, and critical design. Design schools also transform students: Cooper Union transformed women into actors capable of advancing art and science. The Bauhaus attended to the spiritual and personal development of students. Moholy-Nagy saw the designer as the school’s ‘product.’ Ulm taught design in part to help reconstitute German intellectual life in such a way that something like Nazism could never happen again. Malmö produced designers who would democratize the sharing economy. IVREA produced designer-entrepreneurs, while HCI/d produces artful modellers.

The ability of design to produce certain kinds of citizens is not merely an idealistic hope; the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus three times – and even so it came back a fourth (and went back to fight them!). In the United States, design education was linked to progressive social initiatives tied to the realization of the American Dream – a vision of a society in which everyone can contribute. In Malmö, design was used to further Scandinavian democratic practices. Recently, creative industries policies led to sizable government and industry investments in design around the globe, in Indiana as well as China, in Newcastle and Namibia, even as design firms like IDEO and Apple pushed to reposition design in industry from decorative afterthought to the very locus of industrial innovation.

All of these social and political changes depend on – among other things – individuals becoming designers. Our study has offered some insights about that as well. One is that design programmes often distinguish between their first year and all subsequent years. Though they articulate their first years primarily in terms of what is ‘basic’ or ‘foundational,’ it also seems that much of the first year content is also more likely to reflect some form of technical rationality. That is, first year problems and assignments are scaffolded to a degree that they generally are not ‘wicked problems’ but in fact allow students to engage in what seem to be straightforward ‘problem-solving’ activities much of the time. Designer Jon Kolko (Kolko 2017) describes a first-year assignment that he and his cohort were given in which students had to reproduce a magazine spread at scale using a mosaic of tiny bits of paper. While offering considerable latitude in how the assignment is executed, nonetheless the problem and the means of its solution are all well understood and agreed upon in advance – hallmarks of technical rationality. Many design assignments are likewise constrained to give students a chance to practice a method or to solve a technical problem in a setting optimal for such an activity. Learning how to see such matches – that is, situations optimally suited for a given design method’s rigour and rationality – is a major outcome of design education.

At the same time, all of the design programmes we surveyed were interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary in nature, seeking to produce professionals whose abilities are focused on confronting complex societal situations in ways that render those situations tractable to intervention and, of course, by intervening on them via design. These abilities are acquired through practice and engagement – the significance of the studio or the workshop must not be underestimated. And even if technical rationality becomes subordinated at times in design practice to a wider pragmatism/phenomenology, it remains throughout and productively shapes practice through and through.

We offer two final insights from this study. One is to observe that while all knowledge practices change and develop over time, they do not necessarily do so in the same time spans or in response to the same issues. A new technological development might have a strong impact on a knowledge practice associated with technical rationality (e.g. the way that data science has been influenced by the availability of sensors, cloud computing, data mining algorithms, and infovis), while another knowledge practice, say, pragmatism in feminist technoscience, might respond to entirely different issues along different time scales. As a result, any given synthesis of technical rationalism and pragmatism or phenomenology in design are highly dynamic and situational, which means that the productive outcomes of such a synthesis can be (and historically have been) highly diverse in nature. This helps design renew itself and remain effective as a discipline.

The second insight is to highlight the importance of philosophy in both design theory and pedagogy. Virtually every programme explicitly referenced the philosophical traditions on which it was drawing, and many schools’ vision statements can be described as philosophical in nature. Dewey, in particular, comes up almost everywhere, but references to Heidegger, Marx, and feminist philosophy abound not only in mission statements but on course syllabi; students and faculty alike are reading them. That is, a philosophical attitude is pushed down onto the students; students are expected to think deeply about problematic situations, real needs vs. false pleasures, when and how to select methods, and how and what to present of their design activities and outcomes. The central role of philosophy throughout design theory and education suggests something about the nature of the discipline itself is resistant to formalization, and hence design benefits from a certain thoughtfulness – the rigorous thoughtfulness that we associate with philosophy – as part and parcel of the profession.

Conclusion

In this work we critically engaged with the history of design education to reevaluate the relationships between technical rationality and alternative epistemological stances, notably pragmatism and phenomenology. We view this relationship as fundamental to how design positions itself in relation to other fields, including engineering and business, and also, it turns out, to the ways in which we train individuals to become design professionals.

We traced the history of design education by providing examples of nine design schools in Europe and US, in order to show that rationalism (i.e. technical rationality) has been always part of the design and design education epistemology – whether implicitly or explicitly – and we argued that far from being an oppositional conflict, the relationships between technical rationality and what are viewed as more mainstream design epistemologies – pragmatism and phenomenology in particular – have been productive, even helping to shape design as a field (including its subfields) and philosophy. We supported our argument by clustering and then synthesizing the different integration manners, under different themes – i.e. socially progressive and democratized designer (e.g. Cooper Union); a designer who balances sciences, humanities, arts and technology (e.g. Bauhaus); the designer as scientist or researcher (e.g. Ulm school of design), and the designer as an entrepreneur (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea).

We anticipate that this work might help design researchers better navigate the question of when to build on vs. distinguish itself from other epistemologies (i.e. those of the sciences, arts, and humanities), to further the development of the field, and to help the field realize its emancipatory potentials to contribute to more just and democratic societies. We suggest that a more explicit understanding of these epistemologies is beneficial for design education. We believe that such an understanding benefits not only design theorists but also design educators and design students and through them, society itself. Each of these has a role to play in furthering design by fostering an inclusive, critical, democratic design discipline.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank professors Eli Blevis and Shaowen Bardzell from Indiana University Bloomington, professor Pelle Ehn from Malmö University, associate professor Pier Paolo Peruccio from Politecnico di Torino, who have provided valuable insights and information that helped this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maliheh Ghajargar is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design and Technologies at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. She has an educational background in Industrial Design and holds a PhD in Management, Production and Design with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Politecnico di Torino, Department of Architecture and Design. Her research and teaching interests broadly are in design and HCI, including design for reflection and sustainability, forms and aesthetics of interactive objects and critical design processes. She is currently working on a project that investigates the multiple roles of artefacts in sustainable energy transition. She is also engaged in a joint project on design research processes and their underlying epistemologies.

Jeffrey Bardzell is a professor of Human Computer Interaction Design and director of HCI/Design in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University – Bloomington. He has an educational background in comparative literature and his research examines both design theory and emerging social computing practices. His work on design theory has focused on critical design, research through design, and design criticism. His research on emerging social computing practices includes critical-empirical studies on maker communities in the United States and Asia, intimate and sexual interaction, and online creative communities. A common thread throughout this work is the use of aesthetics—including the history of criticism, critical theory, and analytic aesthetics—to understand how concepts, materials, forms, ideologies, experiential qualities, and creative processes achieve coherence in design objects. He is co-editor of Critical Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2018) and co-author of Humanistic HCI (Morgan and Claypool Synthesis Lectures in Human-Centered Informatics).

ORCID

Maliheh Ghajargar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1852-3937

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by US National Science Foundation award #1513604, and was partially financed by the Knowledge Foundation through the Internet of Things and People research profile, Sweden.

Notes

1 Moholy-Nagy (1938).