The 9th Edge Debate: 16th March 2000

Designing Tomorrow's Designers

Michael Dickson, Buro Happold/University of Bath

The Need for Improvement

If I might quote Graham Watts, CEO of CIC, "We live in an era of continuous improvement and the next ten years must be better than the last. For this to be so, we need to capture the imagination and leadership of a younger generation of construction professionals". This seems to me to be the first step to even starting to Design Tomorrow's Designers obtaining enthusiastic recruits to the industry at large and to the cause of the built environment.

To do this we must enhance the appeal of our entire industry and its care for the built environment by stressing over and over again to all who listen the importance of creativity, sustainability, challenge and technology. Training as Designers for the Built Environment must be at least as challenging as for Animation or Media Studies.

Qualities of a Designer

If we are truly to achieve Designers and Designing Engineers for the 21 Century we need to analyse the ideal product (us!) by:

• Looking at examples of current good practice
• Learning from History. References from the Past, Success through Risk Taking.
• Studying what incentives and mechanisms are required to encourage design engineers.
• Challenge, creativity, good career prospects, Recognition
• What are the attributes of designers that best fulfil the role?
• Subversiveness, divergent thinking, methodological use of science and imaginative solutions
• What value do designers bring to the benefit of society?
• Broadly in forwarding elegant solutions where matters of the "head" are of equal importance to matters of the "heart"
• Joining seamlessly spiritual and artistic issues to social and scientific issues following Corbusier's ideal diagram
• Anecdotes from the Past

As a young engineer I went for an interview for a job with Arup Associates - I thought then that broad-based multi-disciplinary working might be the answer. My interview lasted only ten minutes and was ended with the comment "We cannot use you as an engineer because you do not yet know enough about engineering to contribute sufficiently to the process". After a BA and an MS I thought I did. But my interviewers were probably right. The point I am trying to make is that we cannot discount the value of specialist skills but we have to extend the possibilities of inter communication and inter disciplinary working.

We do not want more general education- we need an approach for tomorrow's designers based around 'modules' of particular high level knowledge where a fair proportion of these modules are organised to engage interdisciplinary interest. The words are "modular" and "interdisciplinary" not "general" education.

What is the nature of life long learning? We need to distinguish between

1. Articulate knowledge - the teaching of facts, technology, known processes [base education in science and art]
2. (2) "Tacit Knowledge" – intuition, art, way of the world
3. (3) Skill – drawing, communication, report writing, interpersonal skills

The Base Education which we receive as a lump in our early adult years, largely through institutional processes is a necessary fundamental building block and we add to it from time to time during our life as is required. We learn to manipulate this Base with the gaining of knowledge "as people of the world" and experience. To make use of all this as designers we have to have the skills to communicate the essentials to others around us in order to achieve a common purpose and add to a common elegance of solution.

To illustrate this latter part a bit further, Ted Happold used to say that the "best designs come from teams of people with the widest skills spectrum and habits which could still function together" - again the purposeful linking of individual specialisms to the interdisciplinarity of joint working.

Ian MacLeod in a paper called 'Design Learning' refers to designers needing to have

• A broad span of articulate knowledge
• Deep understanding and high level associativity of knowledge (features of tacit knowledge)
• Able to perform well over a wide range of tasks
• Flexible approach to ideas, eager to span disciplines
• Able to operate in innovative environments, can switch easily between free and focussed thinking
• Large network of contacts

In this way "Design" is the creation of representations of future entities where the entity can be a physical object or process - so the term should apply equally to designers and constructors.

Changes to the Curriculum for Designing Engineers and Engineering

In so far as engineering education goes for creating tomorrow's designers, I would echo the 1997 ISE Design Education Study

• More emphasis on conceptual design - with engineering analysis thought in specialist modules
• Engineers to be allowed to assimilate knowledge to become 'people of the world' - and be encouraged to play a much larger part in college life.
• Modular teaching aimed at teaching the fundamental principle of engineering. I attach a great importance to the teaching of fundamental principals of materials science and engineering theory as a basis for future design practice.
• Schools curriculum to continue with project work as a way of making sense of maths and physics and making it enjoyable!
• Visual appreciation and drawing skills are fundamental
• Project work should be used as a way of developing rigorous joined up thinking as part of the design process
• Project work should be used as a means of teaching the importance of interdisciplinary communication and working – overlapping skills
• Design teaching is demanding on staff time and resources and this is where the industry, if it really wanted it, can contribute
• Fundamentally however if we really have the need of Top Class Designers for Tomorrow then we have to look at ways of increasing the salary and status of the academic staff in the universities and technical colleges.

To paraphrase the RAE report on "Engineering Higher Education". Design is not a single person activity - it is a team activity which requires a wide range of skills to achieve elegant, functional, economic, spiritually uplifting artifacts which are globally competitive. We therefore need:

1. Top class, agile designers able to ensure innovation beyond the standards of current practice
2. Highly competent support designers to ensure continuous improvement of the product

To achieve this requires a better status and pay for university teachers and a continued improvement in the teaching of art, language, mathematics and physics in primary and secondary schools.

Conclusion

The emerging built environment for the Third Millennial Society has to be holistic in many ways embracing environmental, design, sociological and aesthetic factors - to meet the so called "Triple Bottom Line", Social, Environmental and Economic.
Our designers have very rapidly to become conscious of the sustainable
The buildings and environment of the future will be created and maintained by seamless collaboration between professionals each with specific specialisms to bring to the table - but also knowledgeable of matters outside their own discipline from mutual education and enlightenment.
Design will emerge as a result of true cross-discipline collaboration based on ever developing support and resources that technology can give
As a visiting Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Bath, I see the designers of tomorrow entering the industry, having studied on a course where architecture, engineering and construction are taught side by side so that they can see the whole picture as well as the relevance of their own specialisms.
"The interface between engineering, architecture and construction will only work if engineers understand what architects do, and architects understand what engineers do and both understand and are understood by constructors".