Back Issue Stocktaking 2004 Number 20, Spring/Summer 2004

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Practice Points

Leading Practitioners' Perspectives on Continuing Education for Designers

Continuing Education in Design: Intellectually Stunted

A report of a symposium of the Harvard Design Magazine Practitioners' Advisory Board: Bart Voorsanger (Chair), A. Eugene Kohen (Assocaite Chair), Joe Brown (Associate Chair), Greg Baldwin, Roger Ferris, Graham Gund, Wendy Evans Joseph, David Parker, Moshe Safdie, Mario Schjetnan, Cathy Simon, Laurinda Spear, Bill Valentine, Peter Walker, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Tom Ventulett, and Jane Weinzapfel

Although adequate means are available for most design professionals to obtain new technical information and skills in continuing education offerings, these offerings do not meet an equally (if not more) important need: the development and stimulation of depth and breadth of critical and analytical thinking. Practitioners have too few opportunities to re�ect on the values and social obligations that should be driving design and on the subtleties and processes of design itself, and too few opportunities to enter the intellectual discourses of the discipline. These were the primary conclusions of the Harvard Design Magazine Practitioners’ Advisory Board (PAB) at its December meeting at Kohn Pederson Fox in New York.

What’s missing
Missing from continuing education for design professionals are opportunities to step back from pragmatic practice issues (and pressures) and ask basic questions about the goals of projects for clients, designers, users, and the broader society. Such questioning would be informed by the study of many things, including design history and theory, ethics, sociology, psychology, economics, the arts and literature, science, and design criticism. It would encourage thoughtful engagement with the best of recent design production and theory. In other words, continuing education needs to include the kinds of course content and the intellectual stimulation and exploration that many degree-program courses gave designers before they became practitioners. Only with this broader and deeper sort of thinking can designers hope to break new ground in their work, to escape from the rut of habitual practices and habits of thought.

Even continuing education grounded in case studies can serve this intellectual goal as long as the cases’ central purpose is the gaining of critical perspective. For instance, GSD Professors Mack Scogin and Carl Sapers, the first an architect and the second a construction lawyer, have offered a course on design practice using cases that present situations in which difficult and conflicted moral decisions must be made, and this course pushes students to try to define their own personal ethics, to articulate what is good and what is unacceptable professional behavior. Case studies could and should be developed that explore the enabling preconditions for good design in various countries, including the realities of economics, clients, construction, laws, public opinion, and design processes in firms. Also missing in continuing education, as well as in most degree program education, has been the study and inculcation of leadership (as distinguished from management). Insofar as designers behave as leaders in their firms, with their clients, and in their local, regional, national, and global communities, good design has a much greater chance of being understood and supported by those who impact its creation society-wide. An all-too-often absent leadership ability among designers is the capacity to speak and write clearly and persuasively, most importantly to make the case for good design and for their specific design proposals. (It was noted that the GSD’s Executive Education programs do have courses in leadership and public speaking.)

Roadblocks and new paths
Much stands in the way of designers pursuing this sort of education, especially time constraints and the common bias that helpful course content must be exclusively focused on the how-tos and the €nancial bottom line of their practices. Critical and historical continuing education courses for designers have not, at Harvard, attracted many students. Yet successful models exist and can be imagined. Former Architecture editor Reed Kroloff organized two well-attended “Applied Brilliance” weekends for designers with the sole goal of providing broad intellectual stimulation, in this case through the speeches of leaders in fields (like art, science, and sociology) other than design. Harvard Design Magazine could provide similar kinds of symposia in the quiet surroundings of Harvard in two-day sessions, symposia that could also provide attendees all the continuing education Learning Units they need for a year.

What’s out there now By far the most common continuing education occurring in the professional lives of the members of the PAB is the brief in-house lecture/discussion, usually over lunch. Most often, these are provided by product company representatives presenting “infomercials” about their wares. Since designers do need to understand what products they can specify and how those products look and work, these presentations are welcomed unless they descend to misleading hype. Almost as common in mid- to large-sized firms are sessions on practice issues such as liability, information technologies, the Americans with Disabilities Act, building codes, contracts, specifying, negotiation, business operations, project management, and presentation skills— often taught by firm members. Some firms require attendance at some of these sessions.

Other continuing education opportunities fairly frequently taken include reading articles in Architectural Record and filling out an embarrassingly easy quiz on those articles, and enrolling in courses both locally and out of town, in programs offered by for-profit educational firms, by professional organizations and institutes like the AIA, and by a few universities including Harvard.

Dubious and unethical courses
Many of these offerings are, however, exploitative “rackets” and/or nearly worthless in their content. One PAB member spent two and a half days at a conference on how to restore brownstones only to learn at its end that brownstones are all in an unstoppable process of decay. Another member purchased a $180 book on practicing sustainable architecture and then learned that her firm colleagues could not read her copy to get Learning Units but had to buy their own. All too often designers trying to get their continuing education requirement out of the way as quickly and easily as possible end up willing to engage in “educational” activities in which they learn close to nothing or something they do not value, respect, or need. But since they must maintain their state registrations and AIA memberships, they continue to do so.

Proposed innovations
Designers need incentives to pursue worthier and more valuable continuing education. For instance, continuing education units should be acquirable for attending conferences of broad interdisciplinary scope, for reading the Harvard Design Magazine, for participating in Internet-based interactive teleconferences about pre-assigned readings or design problems, and for post-occupancy evaluations of a firm's buildings, evaluations that engage speakers from outside the firm, such as owners, builders, and users. Other foci in need of continuing study include: the design that the trade magazines are publishing; the public processes of design approvals; innovative practice models (such as the collaboration of several firms on the United Architect proposals for the World Trade Center site); cutting-edge construction and building materials science; less expensive good design for poorer people; how superior quality of construction is so often achieved in Japan and Germany; the qualities of powerful institutions that impede or encourage good architecture and landscape architecture; fostering the public realm in the U.S.; and new hybrid projects that entail collaborations of landscape architects, architects, engineers, scientists, etc., projects like transforming an airport to include a shopping center or a metro station to include a museum.
—WSS