5./ Andrea Fraser at O, poster for Otis College of Art + Design. 6.

/ P_NG, Mac desktop creature concept & short clips, produced as a school project.

THE FUTURE OF DESIGN EDUCATION

ANNE BURDICK may be the chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design, but she feels that traditional design education is about to disappear. There are three signicant areas in which design education has to change, she says. Disciplinary boundaries, ideas about clients and audiences, and ideas about what we make. Perhaps most radically, she says that the days of being dened by your mode of outputillustration, web design will soon be over. The consideration will be more whether you are a designer who works on issues of a macro scale, such as global warming, or a nano scale, such as molecular design. Education and skills will be about the context of your workthe body, domestic policyparticularly as the boundaries continue to disappear between a physical space, an information space, a gaming space, and so on. She says that the paradigms of 20th century education have disappeared. That was all about creating an exquisite artifact in isolation. We tried to make timeless objects. People are now starting to understand the interrelatedness of systems and networks, and were learning more from software and labeling designs, even architecture, as version 2.0, 3.0. Its not just form and function any more, designers have to consider social impact, government policy, cultural habits, sustainability in the creative choices they make. Design education will have to grapple with all of these ideas. These societal shifts are so extreme that Burdick isnt sure if universities will continue to be the primary locations for design teaching and learning. Were going to see some crazy experimentation in teaching modes and venues, as weve already seen outside universities with Schools Without Walls and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Colleges are already getting worried about the sustainability of the old model, teaching in one way to lecture halls that are two-thirds empty, and university isnt very well suited right now to what design education is going to require. We need a radical restructuring of the academy. As major institutions struggle to make this shift, she thinks that we might see pop-up schools that will appear for a few years in response to a certain movement or requirement, and then theyll disappear again. She can already see the seeds of change happening in conventional education. Graphic design is already being replaced by more interdisciplinary models, she says. And once you start to dismantle the factory model of the contemporary university, who knows what will happen? My hope is that it will open us up to all kinds of other possibilities. -- ANDREW LOSOWSKY --

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scattered comes up quite a bit, too. Perhaps its a result of what her former teacher (Denise Gonzales Crisp, to be more precise) called her rich yet schizophrenic interests, which she hopes to one day reconcile. She imagines her future work to include an exciting, seamless crossover between all of my interests in print design, design-based education, launching a fashion line, understanding cultural anthropology and nding out how they can inuence each other and co-exist, developing into a practice that has socially

responsible implications. Quite a tedious task, she admits, with my scattered interests! Pantham says the greatest inuence on her work continues to be childrens books. Shes read J.M. Barries Peter Pan and Antoine St. Exuperys The Little Prince multiple times as an adult, she says, because they continue to remind me of simplicity and plain old-fashioned goodness. Ive realized over time that for every second design problem, a Enid Blyton-esque solution is the rst to pop in my head! +++++

Computers, like wireless radios before, became the province of future geeks, like Steve Jobs and Steve Woz Wozniak, who are playing with the prototype for the Apple. The result was the Apple II, which evolved into the Macintosh.
PRINT/April 2011/98