ud2k – designing the design student

Stuart Mealing

Stuart Mealing is a reader in 'Computers and Drawing' at the Exeter School of Art & Design (University of Plymouth), a founder member of their Centre for Visual Computing and teaches in the graphic design department. Trained initially in Fine Art, he exhibited widely and taught in art colleges for many years whilst maintaining an interest in the development of computing and artificial intelligence. He later took a postgraduate degree in Computing in Design and since then has been an Honorary Research Fellow in Computer Science at Exeter University, a founding co-editor of Digital Creativity, has published four other books and his papers have appeared in a range of journals.

With genetic engineering imminent it is tempting to prepare a recipe for the ideal design student. To define the sequences of nucleotide bases in the chromosomal DNA and the conditions of maturation that will, in about 18 years, produce ud2k – the perfect undergraduate designer for the new millennium. A Frankenstein wunderkind built to conceive, create, devise, discover, draft, draw, fabricate, figure, formulate, hatch, invent, mastermind, meditate, model, originate, plot, scheme, style and weave. In short, to design.

This chapter will consider what might be the desirable manifestations of these imaginary biological tinkerings as evidenced by the skills and traits of the monster itself, i.e. what makes a good design student. These qualities will also be considered in the context of tendencies within the university system (in the UK) that is invested with the task of converting this raw material into worthwhile practitioners. Is 'BA (Design)' the ultimate hallmark of a good new designer or might the academisation of design, in order that it can be 'read' as a legitimate subject alongside Law and Classics, have deflected the discipline's natural apprentices?

Any wish-list of key attributes is to be modified, not only in response to the changing needs of design in the real world, but also to the educational structure within which training takes place. It is implicit in the process of selecting students for design courses that there are qualities and standards that are sought by receiving institutions, though these are more likely to be tacitly understood than precisely defined. I suspect that staff conducting interviews across the country would reach a high level of agreement over which applicants are the best and which the worst but there perhaps would be less agreement on a prioritised list of the characteristics they believe aspiring designers should possess. Try placing in order of importance: drawing skills, intelligence, creativity, determination and literacy and state which, if any, are dispensable.

Creativity

Creativity knows no bounds. Its forms are legion, its sources obscure, its ways devious in the extreme, but its fruits are patent for all to see in every domain of human life.

It is hard to imagine a good designer who is not creative but perhaps in a design team there is room for people with a range of talents and their roles may not require the demonstration of 'classical' creativity. I have on my shelves a book with a title that appears, at first glance, from the smug viewpoint of one trained as an artist, to be a classic oxymoron – Creative Accounting. You can be creative within other terms of reference. To apply creativity effectively, however, it needs to be coupled with other things. In studies of leading artists and scientists Anne Roe found that the only trait that stood out in common among individuals was a willingness to work hard and to work long hours. Whilst this is a trait that is likely to contribute to success in many fields, her observation threatens the uninformed impression of casual creativity offering an easy alternative to hard work. Thomas Edison is often quoted as saying that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

The characteristics of the creative act have been widely discussed and there is general agreement in the field that a mixture of rational and intuitive processes are involved and that the result displays originality. It is tempting to think of creativity as not being domain specific, to think that a creative free-thinker could have original ideas in any domain – (original AND useful of course, since to be original one merely has to be wrong when everyone else is right) – but originality is often a re-combination of elements into new patterns, which implies that the elements must be present and that therefore a basis of knowledge in a field is necessary to permit original thinking in that field. It is necessary to study design in order to come up with original design solutions. Indeed most researchers suggest an incubation period for the creative act primed by thorough immersion in the subject area – 'saturate yourself through and through with your subject ... and wait'. Pasteur's famous dictum 'in the field of (scientific) observation chance favours those who are prepared' expresses a similar thought.

Interestingly, however, it is often the newcomer to a field who displays the greatest originality, as the more often an individual has solved problems with given ingredients the greater is the 'set' and the less the likelihood of attaining a further creative solution using them again. Our designer must apparently be both knowledgeable about the area and yet new to it. Hopefully for those with many years' experience, newness can be equated with seeing the familiar afresh.

Educating the creative

Research has consistently suggested that general education does not reward or nurture the creative, Rogers for example saying that in education we tend to turn out conformists whose education is 'completed' rather than freely creative and original thinkers. Perhaps creative behaviour, typified by wild or silly ideas, humour and playfulness, is inconvenient in the orderly world of traditional classroom education. Conformity – 'sit still', 'be quiet' – is inimical to creativity.

In a study asking social science teachers to rate the importance of cognition, memory, convergent behaviour, divergent thinking and evaluation in their subject, convergent behaviour was consistently rated far higher than divergent thinking; nearly twenty times as highly in some areas. I suspect this still holds true across most subjects (and it is pointed out that convergent behaviour is more 'convenient' for the teacher). Other research from the same source showed that the learning procedures of highly creative children are quite different from those of children with high IQs but without high creative thinking abilities and that the highly intelligent children were described by their teachers as more desirable pupils, more intimately known, more ambitious and more hardworking or studious. Although these studies are now some years old, they still beg useful questions about the relative value placed on creativity in schools and on the level of reinforcement that creative behaviour is likely to receive.

Torrance describes a student who displayed some of the most inventive, original and flexible behaviour found in testing several thousand children. His IQ (using the Stanford-Binet tests) was very high at 135 yet he was one of his school's most serious problems. He was not learning to read, had become a behaviour problem and frequently became so preoccupied with his thoughts that he didn't know what was going on in class. He faced a struggle between maintaining or sacrificing his creativity and the resulting problems of uncertain self-concepts, learning difficulties, delinquency and moments of schizophrenic-like withdrawal.

One of the first things that Rudolf Arnheim established in his classic book Visual Thinking is that the educational system is based on the study of words and numbers.

In kindergarten, to be sure, our youngsters learn by seeing and handling handsome shapes, and invent their own shapes on paper or in clay by thinking through perceiving. But with the first grade of elementary school the senses begin to lose educational status. More and more the arts are considered as a training in agreeable skills, as entertainment and mental release. As the ruling disciplines stress more rigorously the study of words and numbers, their kinship with the arts is increasingly obscured, and the arts are reduced to a desirable supplement; fewer and fewer hours of the week can be spared from the study of the subjects that, in everybody's opinion, truly matter. By the time the competition for college placement becomes acute, it is a rare high school that insists on reserving for the arts the time needed to make their practice at all fruitful. Rarer still is the institution at which a concern with the arts is consciously justified by the realisation that they contribute indispensably to the development of a reasoning and imaginative human being. ... The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is distend because it is not assumed to involve thought.

The applicant designer knocking at the door of a 'respectable' university may well, therefore, fail to match its broad notion of ideal entrant criteria. The creative adult was not usually an outstanding student at school but satisfactory examination results are likely to be a pre-requisite of acceptance. If a course is to be filled from applicants who fit a standardised profile and are rich in examination certificates – certificates gained in a system which does not reward creativity – one can only conclude that many creative people are likely to be excluded. Experienced staff are able to make 'imaginative' selections for their annual intake but may have to fight for the right to do so in a culture where the applicants for most subjects apply on the basis of their expected examination grades alone. The knowledge of these criteria can also be expected to have deterred many potential applicants.

Intelligence

It has been observed that those with low intelligence are rarely creative and that the highly creative are usually highly intelligent but also that intelligence is no guarantee of creativity. Intelligence, it seems, is a complex set of inter-related aptitudes and abilities, some verging closely on the temperamental and creativity too appears to lie as much in the temperamental-motivational field as in the cognitive.

I'm sure all teachers feel that they can intuitively tell a clever student from a stupid one and amongst the qualities that amalgamate to make someone 'clever' (skilful, talented, quick to understand and learn, adroit, dextrous, ingenious, cunning) is intelligence – a key ingredient of successful, creative problem-solving. It can, however, clearly exist without the validation of examination attainment; indeed academic intelligence is of limited practical use without common sense and intuition in its application.

Although it might be convenient to be able to assess intelligence, IQ testing has become contentious and is subject to a range of criticisms about what it actually tests, now widely being considered to be biased towards mathematical and language skills and even to institutionalise racism. A useful part of the raging IQ debate has been the definition of categories of intelligence, Sternberg suggesting: analytical, creative and practical, measured respectively by: traditional IQ tests, by problems such as devising an advertisement for a new type of bow tie and by response to real-life hypothetical situations that might arise at work. This offers a more useful perspective on applicants to a discipline in which, it could be argued, little is usefully tested by formal examinations.

Gender

Intelligence, whether measured or intuited, seems a necessary prerequisite for a designer but at the start of the 20th century women were still considered too weak-minded to be academically educated ... It was believed that young women would fall prey to neurasthenia or some other nervous disease if they strained their heads with intellectual challenge.

I do not propose to suggest that either sex makes a better designer; neither do I intend to enter the ongoing debate about whether sexual differences are the result of nature or nurture. I do, however, think it is useful to air the different aptitudes, sensibilities and perspectives that men and women are variously credited with, not in any sense of competition but in recognition of their alternative values. The dolls versus guns argument can still be applied to career decisions and few would be surprised to learn that surveys have shown all bricklayers to be men but only 18% of librarians or that boys are more likely to study engineering and girls to study languages.

Creativity, by its very nature, requires both sensitivity and independence. Torrance says that 'in our culture, sensitivity is definitely a feminine virtue, while independence is a masculine value. Thus, we may expect the highly creative boy to appear more effeminate than his peers and the highly creative girl more masculine than hers'. Test results, for example, using the Terman-Miles masculinity/ femininity scale show college athletes with the highest masculinity score (+92) above engineers (+77) and above teachers (+45) with artists at 0 and homosexuals at -20.

Anne and Bill Moir suggest that girls talk to their toys and boys deconstruct them; that girls tend towards verbal, co-operative games that exercise personal skills whilst boys engage in noisy, competitive games that test one another; that girls have a 20 minute attention span at a time when that of boys is five minutes; that in class girls pay attention and boys fidget; she is good with words and he is good with things. Sociable/competitive, quiet/noisy, compliant/argumentative, in agreement/ in disagreement. The Moirs are led to conclude that:

males and females are drawn by the biases of their brains to learn in different ways and to have different interests and enthusiasms, and any educational system that insists that boys and girls are the same, and must therefore be treated the same, is set to do damage.

By the time higher education is entered upon, a potential designer has had 18 or more years in which sharp differences in gender trait are likely to have been smoothed by peer contact and social mores. Differences are less polarised but the underlying trends are still there. There are 13 mathematically gifted males for every one female; women have larger colour vocabularies, better verbal memory and better performance on a test of finger dexterity; men are more impulsive, impatient and more easily bored; women have better verbal skills but men have better spatial skills and hand-eye co-ordination (the old chestnuts about parking and catching) though women are shown to be better on spatial tests during the low oestrogen phase of menstrual cycle and better at fine manual skills in the high oestrogen phase. One of the more interesting of the Moirs's observations is that women's brains cross reference more efficiently whilst men's focus better; a contrast between floodlight and spotlight.

All these characteristics suggest differences in the way an individual will operate in a design environment. The choice of skills acquired and aptitude for them, the relationship with others in a design team, the problem solving methodologies employed, the briefs accepted (where choice exists), all are potentially influenced by gender traits. A design team (or design course) will have a greater range of skills and perspectives at its disposal if the aptitudes and traits of its members are spread across the gender-typical scale. This need not, however, be the same thing as equal numbers of both sexes if we note again that artists are shown to have a neutral score on a masculinity/femininity test and if we consider designers as being similar, in a meaningful way, to artists.

Art or science

Forty years ago in his Rede lecture C P Snow famously came up with the idea that art and science are two very different, implicitly irreconcilable cultures. F R Leavis and others have presented reasoned rebuttals of Snow's 'laughable melange of elementary error' but the idea persists. Whether or not the two can be considered different cultures they are widely caricatured as being at opposite poles of an axis stretching from hard, rigorous and masculine at one end to soft, imprecise and feminine at the other. There are no prizes for guessing which pole represents which discipline – art is supposedly fun and easy, science is serious and difficult. Having spent blocks of time variously life drawing and coding in C++, I resist any argument that either, taken seriously, is either easy or uncreative or does not present an intellectual challenge.

But if one were to accept such a continuum, where along its length might design be intuitively placed? Somewhere between the two extremes, with illustration close to the fluffy, artistic end and industrial design closer to the tough, engineering end – and within illustration, the technical distanced from the editorial, within industrial design aerodynamics separated from styling? Design disciplines seem to embody elements associated with each of the two poles but rarely exclusively or in extremis. Whilst there are certainly differences between the aims and methodologies of art and science, some discussed elsewhere in this book, there is little difference in the nature of the creative processes displayed in, for instance, mathematics and art.