Everyone loves design these days. The clever gadget, the well-turned tchotchke, that sexy chair you just have to have. But while the technology advances exponentially, the biggest innovation in design might not be in end product, but in process.
Last November, Professor Richard Blythe, dean of architecture and design at RMIT University, was part of a delegation to London to deliver the results of a four-year European Union-funded PhD program into creative process. The point of the program was to interrogate what designers actually do when they design; to uncover the essence of the creative process. By designers, he means architects, industrial, interior, landscape, even fashion designers.
“What we’ve managed to do over a period of several years is produce an extraordinary body of case studies which illustrate how these practices actually work, what their internal operations are, how they relate to each other, how they operationalise the creative thinking that actually drives their practices,” says Blythe by phone from London. “The radical move we’ve made is to say that we should be fundamentally interested in that and we should be able to set up PhDs that enable those practitioners to do what they do in an enhanced way, rather than turn them into theoreticians, historians or material scientists, which is the traditional model.”
In some ways, Blythe’s program is an application of the theory of design thinking, which first arose in the late 1960s and eventually coalesced into academic lore under Rolf Faste, professor of design at Stanford University from 1984 to 2003. Faste pioneered the “whole person” approach to problem solving, centred on the perception of needs.
Local thinking
While Blythe was in London showing the EU how to think about design practice, a few blocks away from RMIT, the Melbourne School of Design (MSD) at Melbourne University was unveiling its 2016 graduate show. Surveying the works on show, the school’s director, Professor Alan Pert, points out that “architecture, landscape architecture and urban design are no longer simply about designing buildings or spaces between buildings”.
What they’re about, he says, is finding responses to “the complexity of the world we inhabit, while recognising the sea change required to solve problems brought about by global realignments in economies, energy production and urbanisation”.
With the populations of our cities – like those of most global metropolises – set to explode, the MSD graduate presentations are appropriately focused on urban adaptation.
The notion of design thinking might be relatively new, but the idea of designers solving problems is not. At times, and in the context of a depleted manufacturing sector, I worry that Australian institutions are a tad too adept at talking design thinking and less active when it comes to design doing. Although it does seem to segue quite nicely into the repositioning of Australia as a service economy.
For those who like their design tangible, there’s always University of Technology Sydney, where industrial designer Adam Goodrum has taught for some time, and where Tom Fereday has just completed his first year supervising the Masterclass in Object Design mentoring program.
One of the most resolved creations from Fereday’s program is a series of brass candle holders by a retired graphic designer who goes by the name of Dart. The 67-year-old Dart Braeder enrolled to keep active. “You want my advice to Australian designers?” Braeder asks. “Make small editions of extremely well-crafted, expensive objects. That’s the way we’ll innovate in the face of competition from mass producers such as China.” Me, I call that design thinking.
