Envisioning Futures of Design Education: An Exploratory Workshop with Design Educator

The demand for innovation in the creative economy has seen the adoption and adaptation of design thinking and design methods into domains outside design, such as business management, education, healthcare, and engineering. Design thinking and methodologies are now considered useful for identifying, framing and solving complex, often wicked social, technological, economic and public policy problems. As the practice of design undergoes change, design education is also expected to adjust to prepare future designers to have dramatically different demands made upon their general abilities and bases of knowledge than have design career paths from years past. Future designers will have to develop skills and be able to construct and utilize knowledge that allows them to make meaningful contributions to collaborative efforts involving experts from disciplines outside design. Exactly how future designers should be prepared to do this has sparked a good deal of conjecture and debate in the professional and academic design communities. This report proposes that the process of creating future scenarios that more broadly explore and expand the role, or roles, for design and designers in the world’s increasingly interwoven and interdependent societies can help uncover core needs and envision framework(s) for design education. This approach informed the creation of a workshop held at the Design Research Society conference in Brighton, UK in June of 2016, where six design educators shared four future scenarios that served as catalysts for conversations about the future of design education. Each scenario presented a specific future design education context. One scenario described the progression of design education as a core component of K-12 curricula; another scenario situated design at the core of a network of globally-linked local Universities; the third scenario highlighted the expanding role of designers over time; and the final scenario described a distance design education context that made learning relevant and “close” to an individual learner’s areas of interest. Forty participants in teams of up to six were asked to collaboratively visualize a possible future vision of design education based on one of these four scenarios and supported by a toolkit consisting of a set of trigger cards (with images and text), along with markers, glue and flipcharts. The collaborative visions that were jointly created as posters using the toolkit and then presented by the teams to all the workshop participants and facilitators are offered here as a case study. Although inspired by different scenarios, their collectively envisioned futures of what design education should facilitate displayed some key similarities. Some of those were: Future design education curricula will focus on developing collaborative approaches within which faculty and students are co-learners; These curricula will bring together ways of learning and knowing that stem from multiple disciplines; and Learning in and about the natural environment will be a key goal (the specifics of how that would be accomplished were not elaborated upon.) In addition, the need for transdisciplinarity was expressed across the collaborative visions created by each of the teams, but the manner that participants chose to express their ideas about this varied. Some envisioned that design would evolve by drawing on other disciplinary knowledge, and others envisioned that design would gradually integrate with other disciplines

Revamping Hypothetico-Deductivism: A Dialectic Account of Confirmation

We use recently developed approaches in argumentation theory in order to revamp the hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation, thus alleviating the well-known paradoxes the H-D account faces. More specifically, we introduce the concept of dialectic confirmation on the background of the so-called theory of dialectical structures (Betz 2010, 2011). Dialectic confirmation generalises hypothetico-deductive confirmation and mitigates the raven paradox, the grue paradox, the tacking paradox, the paradox from conceptual difference, and the problem of novelty

Dialectic of eros and myth of the soul in Plato's Phaedrus

In this paper, I question a widespread reading of a passage in the last part of the Phaedrus dealing with the science of dialectic. According to this reading, the passage announces a new method peculiar to the later Plato aiming at defining natural kinds. I show that the Phaedrus itself does not support such a reading. As an alternative reading, I suggest that the science of dialectic, as discussed in the passage, must be seen as dealing primarily with philosophical rhetoric and knowledge of human souls

Marx, Justice, and the Dialectic Method

An interesting controversy has recently been provoked by Allen Wood. He argues that capitalism, for Marx, cannot be faulted as far as justice is concerned. For Marx, the concept of justice belonging to any society is rooted in, grows out of, and expresses that particular society\u27s mode of production. Justice is not a standard by which human reason in the abstract measures actions or institutions--there is no eternal, unchanging norm of justice. Each social epoch gives rise to its own standard; each generally lives up to it; and each must be measured by this standard alone. Thus, in Wood\u27s view, capitalism is perfectly just for Marx.

A modest plea for a Chestertonian reading of The Monstrosity of Christ

Review of John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009

A note on Marx

Throughout all his life Karl Marx wrote angrily about capitalism. By use of a dialectic approach he was convinced that the working class had to unite and make a social revolution and thereby free them selves from exploitation. Marx himself was in many ways a dialectic person as we try to show in the note. So in some sense he became one with his scientific methodology.

Christopher Rowe's Plato and the art of philosophical writing

The review argues that Plato makes a valid distinction between inferior hypothetical and superior unhypothetical methods. Given the distinction, the book confuses the hypothetical for unhypothetical dialectic