Design and Technology Education (LJMU)

The aim of this article is to investigate and bring to light the constructive impact of Knowledge Creation and Technology Education on the process of New Product Development. This is done under the competence-based perspective of the organization, where knowledge is the point of departure and the individual – in this case the industrial employee – is the relevant unit of analysis ten research enablers were exploited in order to evaluate how New Product Development is influenced by knowledge (tacit and explicit), Knowledge Creation (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) and Technology Education (competence, skills, commitment and fit). Surveys collected from 486 employees, of 51 industrial companies in Spain, were analyzed in order to test the hypothesis. The results of this study allow us to draw conclusions on the significance of the impact that knowledge, Knowledge Creation and Technology Education have, each one on its own and all three combined, on New Product Development

Papoutsakis, Haris

English

The Impact of Knowledge Creation and Technology Education on New Product Development

Baynes, Ken

REFLECTION7Design and Technology Education: An International Journal 11,3The Department for Education and Skillsrecently funded the National Society forEducation in Art & Design (NSEAD) and theDesign & Technology Association (D&TA) to runa seminar on the present state and future ofdesign education. As the D&TA/NSEADbackground paper for the seminar showed, all isnot well with design education. Torn betweenart and technology it is no longer a major focusin schools.  Does this matter and if so why?Clearly those who came to the Royal College ofArt on 11 July thought it mattered. The Rector,Sir Christopher Frayling, put the situation in anhistorical and economic context. I attempted toidentify ‘the essence’ of design education andDavid Prest reported from Cornwall, one area ofthe country where design is alive and well inboth primary and secondary schools. It rapidlybecame clear that there is more than oneargument for design education and even thatsome of the arguments appear (at first sight) tobe contradictory. In a crowded curriculum, whatare the key arguments that will persuade heads,governors, parents and – most important –young people that design is worth studying?I believe there are four arguments that areparticular to design plus one that design shareswith other practical, creative subject areas suchas art, technology, music and drama.Design education emerged in the 70s and 80sand much of the work done then has stood thetest of time. However, society and the world ofeducation have changed dramatically.Significantly, many of the changes serve tomake design and therefore design educationmore important.Key changes since 1980 include:• the steady growth of consumerism;• the threatening environmental crisis;• the growth of new ways of communicating – and so learning – using digital media;• changes in the economy and the means bywhich wealth is created;• changes in children’s culture and the waysociety regards children.These developments in the socio-political realmhave been complemented by extraordinaryprogress in cognitive science and neuroscience.Work in these fields throws new light on thenature of ‘designerly’ thinking and on thepersonal, social and economic importance ofthese thought processes.What cognitive science has done is to showconclusively that designerly thinking and actionare features of the mental activities of allhumans. It has settled the argument betweentwo apparently contradictory views of design.1. That design is highly specialist, complex andesoteric – that particularly the act ofdesigning is something which people can doonly after a long apprenticeship.2. That design ability, like language ability, issomething that everyone possesses at leastto some degree.We now have to accept that these two views arein fact complementary. The highly complexskills of the professional engineer, fashiondesigner or CGI artist are simply the specialistdevelopment of abilities and understandingsthat we all have.The design education ‘movement’ always tookthe broad view and in doing this they werebuilding on a distinguished tradition thatincluded William Morris, W R Lethaby and EricGill. Much of my own work has been concernedwith looking for evidence of latent designerlythinking and activity in young children. It is nowclear that babies very quickly become aware oftheir environment and want to engage with andeven control it. In early play, the role of objectsand play ‘things’ is important.  Many classicchildren’s games involve building worlds ofpeople and things that echo the adultenvironment but which have to be ‘created’using imagination and physical ‘props’.  Pretendshops, houses, vehicles, streets and imaginaryplaces all feature in the mental world of childrenby the time they reach primary school.Design Education: What’s the point?Professor Ken Baynes, Loughborough UniversityREFLECTION8 Design and Technology Education: An International Journal 11, 3Children use their first drawings as a flexibleway of modelling. Early mark making leads onnot only to art but also to symbolic meaning,written language, numerical notation, diagrams,maps and plans. Children’s engagement withmaterials such as paper or clay is exploratory,curious and experimental. It turns out thatdesign capability and what we might call a‘designerly attitude’ is very evident in theactivities of four and five year olds.Evidence of universal design ability also comesfrom evolutionary biology. The evolutionarystory lays great stress on humankind’s ‘generalpurpose intelligence’ which enables us to dealwith unexpected events. Within the generalframework of intelligence there are also quitespecific abilities which seem to have arisen firstfrom our remarkable binocular colour visionand from our ability to coordinate hand andeye. These include the first technologies butalso our ability to imagine alternative futuresand to take social and technical steps to bringabout change. It is this momentous designability that has brought us to the point wherewe have become responsible not only for ourspecies future survival but for the survival of thewhole planet.The arena for design activity is material culture –aptly described as products, places and images.It is designerly thinking and action that shapesthe future of our made world. It happens atevery level, from engineering and architecturaloffices, through fashion design and film studiosto the individual householder creating a settingfor family life. It is ubiquitous in its impact.It might be thought that design is thereforeabout material things. This is not the case. It isalso about people. The made world only hasmeaning in the context of human ideas,aspirations and values. Designing a product, aplace or a message is also to design someaspect of human behaviour.The function of a designed thing always has twocomplementary aspects – its physical performanceand material reality – and its meaning in the livesof those who make and use it. This meaning canbe economic, strictly practical or deeply spiritualand aesthetic.  Very often a design will play all of these rolesand many more.Design activity is directed towards the future. It is, therefore, important to understand howdesigners (and ‘ordinary’ people acting asdesigners) can envisage future things andbehaviours and act to bring them into existence.The key is to be able to imagine them. It wasBruce Archer’s great contribution to identifydesign activity with a particular aspect of thehuman mind – its capability to deploy cognitivemodels that ‘imagined’ past, present and future.Bruce described what designers do as ‘seeing inthe mind’s eye’. In fact, they not only see butalso handle all the other sensory inputs,imagining, for example, the texture of a futurewall, the sounds in a future concert hall or theodours to be extracted from a future kitchen.To help them develop, capture and communicatetheir internal models, designers have over thecenturies invented a whole range of externalmodelling media – drawings, plans, maps, three-dimensional models, mathematical formulae,storyboards, rough lash-ups, highly developedprototypes, computer programs and many others.The interaction between the inner world of‘imaging’ and the external world of physicalmodels is dynamic. The external models showdesigners more about what they are imagining.They verify and extend; they feed back into themind and can change what is imaged. They area medium for speculation and communicationExternal models are also a key to organizing thesocial action necessary to bring the designers’proposals into reality. They are a medium forsharing with others, for gathering their viewsand for working together.Design education must therefore attempt tofoster people’s ability to imagine, toexternalize, to act socially, to construct andlearn from experience. This entails encouragingdesign awareness as well as design ability.Design Education: What’s the point?Design Awareness = knowing about designDesign Ability = being able to designThese two are intimately linked together indesignerly thinking and activity. They relatedirectly to the two essential themes in designeducation:Why are things the way they are?Understanding the past and presentandHow can things be improved?Speculating about the futureThese themes have existential significance.Answering them requires reflection and aconsideration of personal, social and spiritualvalues as well as practical action. In fact, designlinks values and action in a unique way.Consider the broadest context of questioningimplied by the idea of making an‘improvement’. A twelve-year-old might findthemselves speculating very broadly:• What is the world like?• What am I like?• How did the world come to be the way it is?• How did I come to be the way I am?• How can I investigate the world andunderstand it better?• How can I express what I feel and know aboutthe world?• What do I value? Why do I like what I like?• Can the world be made ‘better’?• Is ‘better’ being more like what I like or do Ineed to find out what other people think is‘better’?• Do I need to work with other people toimprove the world? How can I work withthem?• When working on my ideas, what can I learn;can I improve myself while also improving thesituation?• How can I express or represent my ideas sothat I understand them better and can sharethem with others?• How can I make my plans become a reality?• What tools and materials can I use?• How can I use them?• Must I change my plans because of what Iknow about tools and materials?• Is what I have made a success?• What do I mean by success?• How do I find out if it is a success?• Whose judgement is most important indeciding if it is a success?• What have I learnt from trying to change theworld?• Have I changed as a result?• What do I value?• How do I want to live?Clearly the majority of these questions cannotbe said to be only the concern of design. Manyare shared with philosophy or ethics, others withart or craft or technology. But a number can onlybe dealt with by design. The linkage fromintrospection and values, from an understandingof the world as it is, to the decision to act and tograsp that we are changed by acting, is at thecore of what design has to offer as aneducational experience at any level.Writing 21 years ago, I put forward a series of‘basic assumptions’ that would underpin therole of design education in the curriculum. I would stand by them today.1. Design awareness and design ability areinherent capacities of all human beings. They can be developed by education.2. The primary aim of design in generaleducation is to develop everybody’s designawareness so that they can:• enjoy with understanding and insight the man-made world of places, products and images;• take part in the personal and public designdecisions that affect their lives and the life ofthe community;• design and criticize design at their own levelfor their own material and spiritual needs;• bring an understanding of design into theirwork.Design Education: What’s the point?REFLECTION9Design and Technology Education: An International Journal 11,33. Design awareness implies an understandingboth of how the environment was shaped,‘why things are the way they are’, and how itcan be shaped in the future ‘how thingsmight be’.4. Design is about values and valuing. It isconcerned with the question ‘how do youwant to live?’ Education in design must,therefore, highlight the significance of valuesand respect their cultural and personaldiversity.5. Design is about compromise. The man-madeenvironment shows the influence of manydifferent pressures: economic, social,technical, aesthetic, moral, political. Findingthe best balance between them is itself avaluing activity in which design has topropose the most inclusive and potentiallyenhancing of a range of possibilities. It is upto education to give a direct experience of thiswork of debate, compromise and resolution.6. Design studies will seek to develop thosehuman skills that are fundamental to designawareness and design ability. It is typical ofdesign that it depends on coherent andpurposeful interaction between perceptual,analytical, propositional, communicatory,technical and manual skills. These will need tobe developed in harmony.7. In addition to language and number, thedevelopment and communication of designconcepts depends on ‘imaging’ andmodelling.  This is the human ability to makeand use sketches, drawings, diagrams, plans,scale models, mock-ups, prototypes and thelike to represent, shape and evaluate what isand what might be. Design studies will fosterpeople’s skill in using these media for thoughtand action.8. The secondary aim of design in generaleducation is to provide the seed bed fromwhich will come the range of futureprofessional designers – planners; architects;technologists; engineers; industrial, fashionand graphic designers.Brief though these are, we might needsomething even shorter to push the argumentwith busy people.  We could also be a littleopportunistic and spin our case so that it relatesdirectly to some of the toughest problems nowfacing our society. Fortunately, we would beright in so doing: design education is sharplyrelevant to much of the current political,economic and social agenda.1. National competitiveness demands that weencourage and develop the design skills ofpeople at every level of business andgovernment.2. The complex world of modern consumerismmakes it essential to equip young people with‘life skills’ so that they can copeindependently. Design skills and awarenessare essential components in the consumer’stool-kit.3. The threatening environmental crises meanthat we must develop our skills in imaginingalternative futures and bringing them intobeing. Working in a ‘designerly’ way at schoolis the best possible preparation for dealingcreatively with the future.4. Design activity supports personaldevelopment and provides people withintellectual and practical tools to enable themto take control of their own and theircommunity’s environment.  It is, therefore, adirect contributor to an active democracy anda responsible community.Finally, I would argue that design education andparticularly design activity within education canhelp to re-balance schooling which has becomeexcessively knowledge-based and uncreative.Along with art, music and drama, designactivity provides a medium where children andyoung people learn by doing. In these fieldsthey make: it may be a play, a pot, a design butthe essential point is that theory and practiceare reconnected through creative action. Doingand knowing are bound up with one another.This is energizing for young people but it is alsorealistic and relevant to the wider world beyondthe school gates.Design Education: What’s the point?REFLECTION10 Design and Technology Education: An International Journal 11, 3

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The Impact of Knowledge Creation and Technology Education on New Product Development

Design Education: What’s the point?

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