British Industrial Design Education

- (UK) C. Freilin

What to teach design: brain, heart, hand

The two main topics of this international conference are: the producer of the design, the education issue of the designer, and the education issue of the consumer. This is a problem that the British design education community has been discussing for at least 154 years. As early as the autumn of 1937, the British government established its first design school. Since then, two questions have been raised. One is “how to teach industrial designers the most effective way” and the other is “how to best educate consumers so that they understand how to understand and appreciate the designer’s Work.” And the answers to these two questions have been divergent. Sometimes, producers will think in this way: If we can create first-rate designs, the public will naturally admire, and consumers think that: “If the product has no market, why should we educate people to produce it?” because the meeting allows speeches. The time is very short. I cannot have 154 years or 154 minutes to explain in details. I have only 154 seconds to use. The team will combine the three most important aspects of design education. Higher education institutions in the UK have educated more than 18 design students on an overview of key debates in the UK on design education.

Education of the brain: The role of the brain is to engage in research. Design theory research and reflection on design.

Hand education: The role of the hand is to master craft skills, contact materials, and experience the production process.

The education of the heart: The role of the heart is to use the designer's individual creation spirit to understand the social and cultural development trends he will face.

In the middle of the 19th century, Ruskin, the great British art and design thinker, once said: The above three aspects of comprehensive development are indispensable for shaping a perfect designer. Therefore, he believes that the education of young designers should always go through a comprehensive education of the brain, heart, and hand.

Ruskin also wrote that design must be done by the most delicate machinery, that is, human hands. So far we have not designed it. It is impossible to design any machinery that can be as dexterous as human fingers.

The best design originates from the heart, and the combination of all emotions is better than the combination of brain and emotion. Both are better than the combination of hands and emotions. This creates a complete person.

Ruskin wrote this passage in the 1960s. The technology that was available to designers at the time was still at an early stage of development. In addition, the impact of the first industrial revolution in the world on society was greatly shocked by him, and he wrote in the era of psychology, physiology, and anthropology. And studies of cultural theories and other disciplines are yet to be unfolded, so he tries to separate all aspects of human life. In fact, they are inseparable from each other. The hand is controlled by the brain, and the brain is subject to the heart.

Therefore, considering the various subjective and objective restrictions that Ruskin was having on writing this passage, we should admit that his understanding of the brain and his opponent is still worth considering today as it was in Victorian times, because he summed it up for us. The history of the development of design education in the United Kingdom provides a basis, and it also enables us to elaborate the topic of this conference in depth.

When the National Design School, later the Royal Academy of Arts, was founded in London in 1837, 154 years ago, it was mainly devoted to the education of the brain. This design education experiment lasted nearly 1900 and became the basis for most of the "design method" movement of the 20th century.

The basic idea of ​​this early education idea is that design is a language. If you spend several years studying and remembering the grammar rules of this language seriously, one day you will be able to apply it. Therefore, all students learn the basic geometry from the beginning, and then copy the drawings of various buildings in the book or dictionary. Fortunately, they can continue to copy objects in glass cases and use various famous carving models, ceramic tiles, metal bowls, etc. These items played a key role in the entire teaching process. As a result, teachers collected a large number of these items and finally packed the rooms. They had to build a house to stack them. This is what today’s Victorian Burt Museum. Objects that are sketched or portrayed in motion correspond to static objects in the library, and are therefore banned because the founders of the design school believe that such painting activities can motivate students to become artists, and that every Victorian design educator All know (or at least think they know): Art and industrial design are distinct disciplines.

The view of the National Design School is that teachers should develop young people into industry, especially designers or decorators in the textile, ceramics, and transportation tool industries. This is due to the economic development and the resulting optimism. Design Education People believe that as long as design school students learn grammar, that is how they apply their minds, they will be able to enter the industry and improve the quality of everyday products. What the education system lacks are concepts such as “novelty,” “self-expression,” and “creativity.” What it is admiring is the “system,” “grammar,” “method,” and “type.” Or sample) and other words. When the school was later relocated to South Kensington, London, where it is now), the system was gradually known as the "South Kensington System." Sir Victoria Henry H. Cole, the government official of the Victorian era, was the founder of this model. He was the reference model that led him to become a design school in the UK. He was also the founder of the standardization of the British railway gauge and the 1851 British The planners of a product exhibition are not accidental, because design education also expects some kind of standard.) In the 1870s, this education system was far away from oceans and was introduced into Canada and Massachusetts in the United States. .

We call this tradition of exquisite rules, techniques, and organizations the “standardization” tradition. Under the premise of obtaining information with certain technical guarantees, it still represents a viable education method. For example, the "System Design Method" movement of the 1960s was basically a similar hypothesis. It attempted to divide the design thinking process into clear and general "several steps" and to permeate them throughout the teaching process. Young designers start with abstraction and go through several intermediate steps to reach the figurative.

Many "design studies" are conducted using this design method. When it comes to the appearance of a product, it uses semiotics (symbolic language) as an aid. When it comes to visual choices, it uses computer "morphological grammar" to assist in its completion.

From the 1890s, some people in Britain began to oppose this type of education system. They are a group of educators and designers trying to shift the system's brain training to the training of their opponents. They believe that if the "South Kensington System" aims to fully educate students, and in fact it can only accomplish half the tasks, then it is extenuating because most teachers can only do so; and it is intentionally so. It is doomed to failure. If we cannot teach students how to use grammar, ie how to do it, we cannot teach grammar. To understand design, we must understand how it came about. To a certain extent, this is what Ruskin expressed when he elaborated on the concept of "the complete man."

Therefore, under the influence of the British craft movement and the doctrines of Morris and Ruskin, there has been a renewed emphasis on design practices, especially the importance of craftsmanship of jars, metal products, furniture and textiles. . Instead of arranging library bookshelves, drawing boards or collecting museum exhibits as before, design schools replace collection craftsmanship such as wheels, lathes, saws and looms.

On the other hand, the once highly valued design and decoration rules were abandoned, and the organizational principles of design education were architectural architectural theory and practice. In 1896, the famous British crafts designer w. Crane served as the principal of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (in this year, the school was renamed from the National Design School to the present name). He believes that since "architecture is the mother of art," it must be able to inspire design inspiration. Therefore, the design courses offered by the Central School of London and the Royal Academy of Arts require that all first-year students must study architectural history, architectural philosophy and architectural painting while also learning basic courses in calligraphy. Then they can choose from the following four specialties:
1). Decorative fresco (design school will remove "decoration" from "mural" before it is 25 years later).
2). Engraving and modeling
3). Construction
4). Design (process)

This education system still lacks such concepts as “novelty” and “self-expression”, and gives high priority to “practice”, “hands-on-hand design”, “process quality”, “level of skill”, etc. One design professor, LEE Leby, proposed to engrave the following sentence in the most exquisite font on the door of each design college: “no art that is only one person deep can be “Very good art” (There is only one deep art is by no means a good art.) This is a tradition that focuses on design and hands-on production. It requires that design work must be based on tradition. On several occasions, Lizabe added that students They will be able to stand on the shoulders of previous generations (work), but they will never allow them to jump off the shoulders of their predecessors. This is a challenge to the consistent low quality of the mass-produced industry and the basis of the ideology on which it depends. Only this one product obviously has to put more effort into it, it focuses on the weight, not the quantity.So if the students spend 3 to 4 years, seriously think about the tradition, master a skill this Apprenticeships used in the classroom the way they could one day change the quality of the visual environment, not through simulated industry environment, but really and actually through the arts and crafts workshop practice. These are from the United Kingdom