Design school: Undisciplined and irresponsible

Any advance in design education should have a direct impact on the conditions of the world we live in. However, there are sets of conditions that are impacting on design education in ways that the history of the discipline has not traced, and as such need to be explored. And there is a mix of factors shaping the design school—internal, external and contextual—that together are making a significant impression on the education of the designer. The major external factors are two socio-cultural trends; the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, and ‘making’ consumed by digital reproductivity. This second factor is essentially external to the discipline because the digitalisation of design did not arise from the internal factors of the traditional design school—design studio /history/theory, techniques of making, and techniques of representation. And while these two trends are shaping education in general, it is also important to consider the impact of the corporate concept of organization, now ubiquitous in the tertiary sector, which locates programs in faculties based on criterion that more often than not have little to do with the pedagogical systems in use since the inauguration of the Bauhaus. We also propose that the internal factors are subject to constant change (both in content and learning outcomes) due to three other related contextual factors—the educational policies of governments, the aims and expectations of the profession, and the organisational strategies by which universities allocate resources.