Experience Design Education: Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater?

Experience Design Education: Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater?

Bill Buxton
March 22, 2007

Is design changing? Ah yes, let me count the ways. Well, I would … but I can’t count that high. So I’ll try something different.

I had an insight about this around the time that I was finishing my Sketching book: that today we are somewhere between 1927 and 1929. What I mean is that we are today - with the emerging nature of design that we are defining – where industrial design in the US was then.

This is when people like Walter Teague, Harley Earl, Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Loewy set up shop. Just as there are few schools today teaching experience design, there were no schools then teaching industrial design. Like us, they came from a hodge-podge of backgrounds – graphic design,engineering, theatre set design, and fashion illustration, respectively – yet somehow figured it out. That all but one of the firms associated with them (Teague, GM, and Dreyfuss and Associates)are still in business, despite this being right on the threshold of the great depression, is a testament to the fact that they not only got it right, but that design was more than an expensive luxury. It was fundamental to the business success of their clients.

I believe firmly that – if anything – this is even more the case today than it was then!

So where does this leave us in terms of education? Confronted with the lack of an established curriculum, what should be taught? How should we teach it? How do we lay an appropriate foundation for the future of the discipline?

Here is my fear around these questions: in the rush to embrace the new, we are forgetting the fundamentals that stood Earl, Teague, Dreyfuss and Loewy in such good stead. As a result, we risk blowing it.

There are two ways in which I think we risk really screwing things up. First, in general, in the great rush to show how clever, innovative, unique and inventive we are, we do a terrible job at learning/teaching the history of our various design traditions. Second, we have forgotten one of the most fundamental tenants of art and design education, namely, the value of separating the teaching of technique from the teaching of the art. As it turns out, the two are not unrelated.

Starting with the first, how can we expect people to be mature interaction designers if they have no deep understanding of the history of the field and its techniques? Why is the (relatively short) history of the discipline not as well known and taught as the history of any other creative discipline, such as music, architecture, or painting?

Part of the answer is that nobody has written a history, and furthermore, the videos that document the dynamics of that history, which are so important, are difficult to access. But those are reasons, not valid excuses. We need to adjust our priorities. This is something that goes right back Vetruvius’ first chapter, on the education of the architect.

This brings us to my second point: we compound the problem by not separating the teaching of technique from the teaching of the art.

In contrast, when I was in music school, for example, my classes on harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration were completely separate from my classes in composition. The former dealt with technique while the latter was on the art of music. In the former, we were marked solely on our command of the rules. There were no bonus marks for writing a wonderful fugue or choral. It was just about our mastery of technique. On the other hand, in my composition classes (which were often with the same teacher), I could break all the rules of harmony or counterpoint that I wanted. I could make up my own rules. All that mattered was the quality of the music that I wrote. The assumption was that the time spent developing technique provided the foundation for the creation of the art. One built on the skills of the other, but by teaching them separately, the student could always focus on the task at hand.

The same is true in classical art and design education. There are classes such as printmaking, life drawing, and water colour, whose purpose is to lay a solid foundation in technique. This underlies the complimentary set of classes that focus on the content of the work—the art rather than the technique.

It seems to me that this model works, is proven, and can be applied to experience design. Furthermore, in the process, we can follow another established tradition, and in so doing, address both of my points together. What I have neglected thus far is to observe that the main pedagogical approach to free the student from the art so as to concentrate on technique was to have their exercises based on reproducing the work of past masters. Hence, one’s development of technique progresses hand-in-hand with an understanding of history – not some book-learned history, but hands-on down-and-dirty deep experiential exposure to that history. Exposure through reproduction. That is, something that lays a deep experiential foundation for future creativity and informed decision making.

At the risk of being redundant, copying the classics is not only a good way to help gain a visceral appreciation for the contributions of the past, it is also an excellent means of exercising the development of technique, without the compounding detrimental effect of trying to solve a new design problem at the same time.

Without a conscious and concerted effort to expand our personal breadth of experience, especially with the history of our discipline, what can we possibly expect to draw on if we truly want to be experience designers?

Jimi Hendrix asked the right question:

Are you experienced?

Bill Buxton is a Canadian researcher, designer, and writer who is currently Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. This essay is adapted from his new book, Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.

The drawing studio at the Department of Fine and Applied Art of Drexel University in 1892. Before doing “art”, one had to be able to do good pencil. And the way to develop that technique came anout by sketching plaster casts of classical sculpture. Photo: Drexel University Archives and Special Collections.

Drawing antiquities in drawing class at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2004. In many ways, nothing has changed in the traditional art education. So why do we tend ignore the associated lessonwhen we approach experience design?Photo: Rachelle Bowden.