ANDY: Rick, regarding academia and it’s “fixation to ignore the really interesting and productive examples of online collaboration and to only showcase the grand Professors and organizing committee members of such conferences and the menial work they more often are doing” – that’s a real can of worms. But let’s open it anyway.

I think the first thing to address here is that academia and education is changing. Charles Leadbeater has researched and written some great work on this. Well, I say they are changing, but it’s more of a case that they need to change and it will be forced upon them. The pyramid of expertise, of professional elitism, that has driven education has been over-turned in many areas thanks to the web, but higher education in particular is predicated on the idea of a select few having expert knowledge. It’s no wonder that, regardless of new technologies and cultural shifts, the “grand Professors” carry on with their traditional mode. Cultural change requires generational shift, as I mentioned before. Put bluntly, the old men (for it is mainly men) in tenured Professorships need to retire and/or expire in order for that change to happen.

Higher Education research – particularly in design and science – should be a hive of rapidly changing activity in my opinion. But it’s not. Research grants and publication are always historical and extremely conservative. Nobody gives a research grant to someone with a good idea that might be worth exploring. Research grants - in design and the humanities at least – are given to the safest bet to people with long track records and the publications are often a re-write of previous material. HE research creeps forward at a snail’s pace. It should be a rocket.

Academia is, also, notoriously introspective. Some of that is because of the reasons above. There aren’t nearly enough design practicioners in design academia. There certainly aren’t enough good ones, because the environment and conditions are just not set up to entice them. Not only can academia not pay enough (though, I think, that’s not such a big consideration), but the requirements for an applicant to be a Professor, for example, will be a PhD or a significant academic track record. So you’re not going to get someone with a wealth of knowledge in the industry, you’ll get someone who has published papers about design theory. A PhD is pretty bloody useless in a design studio. I know, I’m writing mine right now and it’s pretty much put a stop on any design work.

It’s no wonder most of the design and education material presented at academic conferences seems so lame. It is lame – handicapped by the structure it operates within.

But it need not be that way. Re-thinking what constitutes research, re-thinking the value of design research and re-thinking how it is funded is one (slow) route for change. Personally I think private institutions are going to end up in a much better position in this area. They can move faster, aren’t bound by archaic and science dominated funding and will be less and less the “spoilt rich kid” option because public institutions are becoming equally as expensive.

Lastly, conferences (and quite possibly most journals) are, by and large, a farce. There are a handful of worthwhile ones, but most conferences’ peer-review process is a joke. Conference organizers know that academics need their research points from presenting papers and so they can charge enormous fees. The more presentations, the more fees. So there is a high incentive to accept almost all the submitted papers and the peer-review process is pretty much devoid of purpose. Accepting so many papers means that conferences have so many parallel sessions (of people giving a 20-minute presentation of a 4,000 word paper) that nobody really talks about the same issues, which is what a ‘conference’ should be about. The irony is, of course, that the people paying the conference fees are also providing the content.

I think some online work could work wonders here, but I’m not so much a fan of ‘online conferences’ that just follow the same format. I think ongoing conversations and collaborations are much more valuable.

I’d like to open this up more to anyone who has patiently followed our (long) conversation and ask what others think? Are there some better solutions? How can academia and professional design come together better? What prevents it and where are the dislocations?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 7:54 am and is filed under Design, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.