Changes in Design Education Promoted by Collaborative Organization: Distribution and Fragmentation

Abstract

This paper is predominantly based on observations pertaining to the transition from design industrial production to the design organization collaboration model. Moreover, it discusses the requirements of this collaboration model on the design students’ training and changes in design education methods.

The most impactful change in design education has been its distribution and fragmentation as brought about by networks. In other words, teaching resources, such as the knowledge and skills necessary for student growth, are scattered with different means of communication. The systematic knowledge that was originally acquired in the classroom or in books can now be obtained anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, such knowledge can be learnt from any point rather than a specified beginning.

To illustrate, this thesis starts by introducing the distribution trend in design; outlining the changes in design organizations; and identifying the challenges facing design education. In order to study design education development in China, we surveyed design graduates from the last 3 years. Next, we summarized the distribution and fragmentation of design education; putting forward new methods in design training as taught in schools.

1 Introduction

1.1 Distribution Trend of Design

It has been less than half a century since Stuart Hall published the essay Encoding and Decoding Television Discourse (1973). However, in the torrent of the digital age, the encoding and decoding of information have surpassed the boundaries of traditional media, while increasingly becoming the basis for real-life activities, including design behavior. Moreover, with self-media, political and organizational power behaviors in the coding process have been widely replaced by professional powers. Meanwhile, professional powers in design are transitioning from experts, scholars, and designers to countless non-professionals. In the field of design research, the broad consensus is that, in the social life composed of the Internet and the Internet of Things, people have experienced a transition from mass communication to niche communication. At the same time, design has increasingly become a new type of “equal interaction.” The widespread knowledge-sharing method has changed; allowing everyone to be the subject of design behavior, which has altered the one-way and passive nature of the traditional grant-receive relationship from the past, while also allowing individuals to participate in design activities in an equal manner. This trend of “everyone participating in design” has gradually changed the modern design face following on from the arts and crafts movement at the end of the 19th century. In addition, unimaginable changes have taken place in the main body, objects, procedures, production and presentation methods, organizational forms, etc. The distributed and fragmented design organization and collaboration approach brings new challenges to design education. Recipients are now seen as the fundamental basic topic in design education.

1.2 Design Collaboration in Different History Periods

The collaborated design organization is a new model of the current design industry organization. Throughout the history of design development, the changes in design organizations and institutions could be divided roughly into the following three stages.

Firstly, the handcraft design stage, namely, the design organization adheres to the fairly rigid class system or in accordance with the three-level responsibility system which is composed with supervisor, manager and manufacturer, and this kind of management usually runs successfully by carving names of the craftspeople on their hand-made products. It’s really good accountability mechanisms, but on the other hand it’s quite stict rules for the ones who created fine crafts.

Secondly the industrial design stage, during which the organizational structure of design has been gradually transforming from the strictly hierarchical “Carving Names on Utensils” system to “Trade Associations” (“Handicraft guild” in western countries), following with design association, during which the designers and the manufacturing workers further substituted craftsmen, forming the semi-autonomous design organization. Founded in 1907, the Deutscher Werkbund served as a representative, which provided abundant talents resources for the establishment of Bauhaus and the rapid development of German design after the war.

Thirdly, in the stage of information design, people began to ponder on modern industry since although it tremendously upgraded the life quality and living standards of the public, these industrial products were generally considered to be as cold and icy as the machines that made them. During the time when machine production made vastly contribution to improvements in production efficiency, it had been kept apart from the traditional creating concept in which the man’s spirit maintained harmonious with material life during tranquil times. Finally design things are changing with the computer science and technology and the rapid development of Internet, education of design colleges and universities should establish a new system facing the decentration, de-administration, and flat management structure in design industry.

1.3 Challenges Facing Design Education

Many designers and researchers have argued that design education in colleges and universities does not match the needs of the design industry, especially the training methods used in school, as these were originally proposed for industrial production. As a result, they are no longer suitable. Named designer Gadi Amit notes that the quality of recent grads has stagnated or even diminished [1]. According to Herbert Simon’s “science of design”, the post-war universities have created “a new subculture of scientific practices—training regimes, conceptual schemes embodied in research practices, and disciplinary training” [2]. According to Don Norman, “To deal with today’s large, complex problems, design education needs to change to include multiple disciplines, technology, art, the social sciences, politics, and business.”

The Internet has promoted the integration of various disciplines in design, while simultaneously bringing new challenges to design education. Distributed, fragmented, and immediate, it has become the inescapable future of design education.

2 Research Background

2.1 Design Education Since 1914

The training objective of design education is to cultivate talented individuals so that they can one day work in production. Therefore, design education has always been associated with the design organization structure and its requirements for workers.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the guilds of medieval craftsmen took on the task of cultivating traditional craftsmanship. Craftsmen passed on their skills from generation to generation through the master-apprentice arrangement, whereby the teaching and exchange of skills took place in a small area. After the Industrial Revolution, factory workers manufactured numerous industrial products that had peculiar shapes and impracticalities, which were then exhibited at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851. The “Arts and Crafts Movement” that was subsequently triggered opened the doors to modern design. Design has changed from an act of craftsmen instinctively processing materials in a specific manner to determining the design of everything before the production process even begins. Starting from the “Government School of Design” (which was the predecessor of the Royal College of Art) in 1837, Charles Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, William Richard Lethaby’s contribution to London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts, Walter Crane’s service in Reading University and the Royal College of Art in South Kensington all delivered innovative design education. Bauhaus represents the epitome of such efforts to emphasize the need to standardize designs in line with machine manufacturing, while simultaneously integrating science, logic, and art, which led to modern design education closely following the production of machine industry.

In 1969, Herbert Simon published The Sciences of the Artificia; establishing that “design is the core of all professional training”, and promoting the transformation of design education from studio practice to laboratory research. While design education remained a “training apprenticeship”, it was delivered under an expert research scientist instead of a master worker. It fit into the manufacture and production of products in the post-industrial era. Moreover, in the current distributed collaborative organizational structure, this educational model has also become somewhat outdated (See Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Changes in teaching method reform in design education brought about by the transformation of design industry and organizational structure.

2.2 Changes in the Design Concept in China

Many scholars acknowledge that, because “the universality and openness of design concepts determine the universality and openness of the design profession” (Dai FuPing 2012), design is freed from the inherent meaning of shape design. Furthermore, design is crucial for “diversified, personalized, scientific and rational needs, and [creates] a better physical and mental experience” (Lu YongXiang 2015), as well as inspiring “people’s freedom and joy” (Xin XiangYang 2012), and “determining the sustainable development of all humankind” (Liu GuanZhong 2013). In this sense, existing design education can “expand from product design to service design, from service design to social innovation, and use design thinking to promote the development of social innovation as a whole, while also promoting more extensive application design. This in turn can transform design into an effective tool to drive national construction, economic and cultural construction, social construction, and advance modernization.” (Xu Ping 2017). Thus, the integration of design and various disciplines meets both its essential requirements and those of society.

In the historical process by which western learning spread, the discipline of “design” in China was known as “pattern”, “arts and crafts” and “design” (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.

Changes in the design concept in college education in China.

• Pattern. Mainly used since 1930, was represented by Chen Zhifo Principles of Pattern ABC. The words “pattern” and “artisan” were both came from Japan, used to summarize the early flat graphics and three-dimensional design.

• Arts and Crafts. From the 1950s to 1990s, “Arts and Crafts” used to refer to the design and production of various arts and crafts related to daily life. And it has always belonged to the arts under the category of literature, and is a second-level discipline (once a third-level discipline).

• Design. According to “the Undergraduate Specialty Catalogue of Higher Institutions” edited by the Ministry of Education in 1998, Art Design took place of Arts and Crafts, and “Design Art” was used in catalog of postgraduates issued by the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council.

2.3 The Scale of Design Education in China

According to a study from the Design Theory Research Team (led by Professor Xu Ping) of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, as of 2019, 2124 institutions and universities have established majors in design, up from 1917 in 2012. When the first National Symposium on Arts and Crafts Education in Colleges and Universities was held in Xishan, Beijing in 1982, only 14 colleges and universities in China offered design majors. In the past 40 years, the China Education Development design has made considerable progress, even in the most remote areas, such as in Tibet, where 2 colleges now offer majors in design. However, most of the design and related professional teaching resources are still concentrated in the more developed parts of the country. The coastal areas, open cities and provincial capitals still host a great proportion of China’s design teaching resources.

Here are the statistics for 2019:

• 2,124 - the number of colleges and universities with majors in design or related subjects

• 9,749 - the number of design majors offered

• 647,384 - the number of students majoring in design.

Situation of the Universities and Colleges with Design Majors.

In 2019, the above-mentioned colleges and universities recruited 647,384 new students in design majors. According to the continuous follow-up survey for the past 12 years, the number of new recruits in design majors in China’s colleges and universities has grown every year for eight years in a row. Moreover, in the past five years, the number of design majors studying in China has totaled 2 million; while the number of planned graduates in the next 10 years exceeds 4 million (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.

The situation with design majors in China in 2019.

Distribution of Universities and Colleges.

Among the more than 2,100 institutions in China, more than 110 institutions award master’s degrees in design, while 19 institutions offer doctoral degrees in design. However, these 19 doctoral programs are concentrated in only 8 provinces and cities, while the remaining 23 provinces, cities, and autonomous regions offer doctoral programs. Due to data limitations, the above statistics do not include Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but the Macao University of Science and Technology was authorized to set up a first-class doctoral degree in design in 2014. Of the 2,124 institutions, 1,122 are ordinary undergraduate institutions, accounting for 53%. Meanwhile, 354 are freshmen in design and 214 are in related majors, which account for 55% of new design students in the year; 1,012 are vocational colleges, which account for 47%. Another 293,710 are new students in design and related disciplines, which account for 45%. Among general undergraduate colleges, there are 545 comprehensive colleges, which account for 26%; 239 polytechnic colleges, which account for 11%; and 38 art colleges, which account for about 2% (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4.

Situation of universities and colleges with design majors in 2019.

Distribution of Design Fields in Academic Education.

Among the aforementioned institutions, there are specific specializations in China. Such as:

• Environmental Design, including Landscape Architecture, Urban and Rural Planning, Interior Design and Lighting Design. In some case, the first two are also attributed to Public Space Design.

• Architecture Design.

• Industrial Design, which also named as Product Design.

• Visual Communication Design, including advertisements, posters, printings, websites and so on. Lots of schools use Visual Communication Design instead of Graphic Design.

• Multimedia design, the same as Digital Media Designs.

• Animation or Film.

• Clothing and Apparel design.

• Exhibition Design, which absorbed the old stage design and Lighting Design.

• Arts and crafts, including all kinds of handicraft design.

In addition, an interdisciplinary field has emerged, such as the offering of the Art and Technology major in Tsinghua University, which is a special subject from the undergraduate professional directory issued by the Ministry of Education in 2012.

Among them, the majors with the largest number of settings and of new students are environmental (art) design and digital media, followed by visual communication, industrial (product) design, and animation design. The connotation of animation and digital media is very close. In addition, part of the teaching content of visual communication design has been highly digitized. Therefore, the “(digital) media design” major has become the de facto number one major. China’s design education has incorporated digital content for the digital age. All the majors included in the statistics are distributed across various disciplines, such as arts, engineering, and journalism, which are beyond the scope of the “arts” discipline.

2.4 New Methods in Design Education

The rapid, convenient, and low-cost dissemination of information and knowledge brought by the rapid development of information mediums has made the channels for acquiring knowledge of learners infinitely wider, which has led to the emergence of gradually distributed learning. It was believed that learning is distributed among individuals and their surroundings, including their peers, the media, the environment, culture, society, and time. Moreover, the nature of the distribution of learning processes between cognitive subjects and the environment was emphasized.

The emphasis on learning subjects has already began, an example of which is the flipped classroom, whereby the traditional presentation methods of classic teaching shifts from what teachers are saying to how students are learning and retaining knowledge and information. The idea came from two secondary school chemistry teachers, who wanted to help their students who lived far away and often missed class as a result [3]. After that, the teaching staff began to focus on delivering more intense and interactive experiences for students in the classroom.

The subsequent form is based on the theory of distributed cognition, which was put forward by Edwin Hutchins. Based on his observations on US navy ships, Hutchins posited that the mind is in the world (as opposed to the world being in the mind). In other words, the necessary knowledge and cognition to operate a naval vessel do not exist solely within one’s head. Instead, the knowledge and cognition are distributed across objects, individuals, artifacts and the tools in the environment [4]. This places more emphasis on collaboration in design learning (Table 1).

Table 1. Differences between the three teaching modes: traditional classroom, flipped classroom and distributed classroom.

3 Research Method and Process

3.1 A Survey of Graduates Majoring in Design

Scope of the Survey.

The survey is divided into two parts. The first part examines employment and academic satisfaction data for the 2016, 2017, and 2018 three-year undergraduate graduates. The second part consists of a field visit to emerging design organizations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. In order to investigate the actual needs of design graduates, they were interviewed so as to identify the difference between the teaching goals of colleges and the skills required by companies.

Based on the survey, conclusions are formed regarding the following two issues:

• 1. What are the competency requirements for teaching design in universities?

• 2. What kind of teaching method is most effective and practical?

Research Progress.

For the first part of the survey, we designed a questionnaire covering employment status (employment or non-employment, further education), corporate information, salary and other issues, which were reported in 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. In spring, more than 85% of the data feedback came from undergraduate design graduates of the previous year, while 10% came from design enterprise practitioners who graduated more than 2 years ago. The recovered data were processed and compared so that we could form our preliminary conclusions.

In the second part, we focus on design collaboration organizations based on information interconnection. Professional teachers and classmates were interviewed with company personnel. We also designed an outline of the problem, with a focus on the design of the business situation of the company or studio, as well as in-depth communication concerning designers’ working conditions and difficulties. Next, we combined the new design organization form with the design ability requirements.

Data Analysis.

In general, the employment rate of design graduates is steadily declining, in part due to the current employment situation in China. Based on the job search data, the average level of employment within three years is more than 70%. For students that choose to study abroad after graduation or pursue postgraduate studies, this proportion will be higher. Interestingly, despite the decline in the number of people employed in companies, the number of people choosing freelance work or setting up a personal design studio has been rising.

As for skills, we compared the demands of design organizations and present conditions. Most of the design companies we visited believe that professional design skills were the most important, but they also value the abilities to communicate and collaborate in a team; to assess key connections in a project; and to lead by arranging work at the right time. Further factors also determine designer success. Moreover, the survey of graduates who work in design enterprises now shows that more skills are generally gained during the internship component of college studies (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5.

Design students’ capacity-building based on the real requirements for graduates working in design enterprises.

3.2 Distribution and Fragmentation of Design Education

As stated above, the field of design practice has always valued collaboration and cooperation in different history periods, which is also reflected in design education. Along with global internet popularization, distribution and fragmentation appeared in design education.

Interdisciplinary Components in Design Education.

The original mechanism for collaboration and cooperation came into being after the handicraft making stage, long before the birth of modern design methods. The collaboration of artisans at that time was still based on personal creative labor – which included the entire labor process from conception to production - as the connection node. A Study of the painting system of Dunhuang shows that, as early as the Tang Dynasty, there were corresponding professional teams responsible for every step from excavation of grottoes to the production of mural statues [5]. This led to the creation of the oldest learning form: learning from a mentor after a ceremony of inviting teaching.

With the modernization of mechanical civilization, the design procedure and manufacturing were separated, as they now are in modern design. Design cooperation during this period often occurred between the brainwork and physical labor that were split by modernization, such as graphic designers and draftsmen, interior designers and carpenters or masons. Design education also adheres to different professions; as disciplinary training creates specialized designers. Graduates in graphic design cannot engage in animation or garden design, and vice versa. Entering the era of digital creativity, the media and Internet now occupy all aspects of social production and life. Traditional design majors, such as graphic design, animation design, and video design, which are distinguished by different forms of design information, have emerged and created a trend of multidisciplinary integration. At the same time, design education has become clearly distributed and fragmented (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6.

The distribution and fragmentation of design education. One can meet all one’s informational needs through any channel online, such as ebooks and vlogs. All the trivial points or even insignificant ones form the necessary capacities.

Distribution.

In the system of experts and professionals established by modernism [6], professionals represent the foundation of social trust mechanisms. The capabilities and knowledge that shape professionals usually exist in books and require systematic study. As a result, modifications and updates all take a long time to accumulate. Distribution serves to stress the fact that knowledge is dispersed in the environment.

To illustrate, if someone wanted to learn how to use a certain software package, such as Adobe Photoshop, they would have previously needed to purchase a dedicated tutorial, or take a relevant course at a university or training institution. The learning process would follow the chapters of a book or curriculum. Nowadays, with the help of the dedicated websites, such as Quaro and YouTube, studying has now been dismantled and the relevant resources are available to everyone. It is now much more important what students want to learn than what others want to teach. At the same time, distribution also means that there is extensive information that exists in various forms. Mobile phones, computers, televisions, and other media that can access the Internet can obtain the required information in real time.

Fragmentation.

In traditional classrooms, teaching normally takes the form of a single 3–4 h class. Teachers thus have to arrange each hour in accordance with the curriculum. Since 1960s, a small but growing movement called deschooling (or unschooling) has spread across America. It is argued that school teaching is an institutionalized education that goes against human nature, as it requires people to go to a prescribed place to listen to a prescribed person within a prescribed time [7]. It seems that we lacked a proper means of combining school and social education until now. With the transfer of knowledge through networks, systematic knowledge have been broken up into thousands of small points, which are disseminated through different media. TED talks rarely exceed 20 min. Moreover, a single skill can be explained in a short, 3–5-min video.

For school education, the significance of fragmentation lies in the fact that we can reconstruct the classroom model and transform it into a teaching form whereby students sit as the core organization; thus giving full play to their subjective initiative.

3.3 Design Education in Distributed Classrooms

Digital technology and the Internet have created a distributed classroom, with teaching activities that focus on the learning initiative of students.

In the knowledge transfer process, all factors serve as learning resources, including teachers (usually considered supervisors), teaching materials and other information from multiple media channels. The learning content and skills training are no longer an immutable knowledge entity, but rather represent the distributed storage and flow of information, which are widely dispersed among various learning resources.

The learning space of students is no longer limited to schools or classrooms, while the time when people study is no longer limited to traditional school hours. Knowledge transfer is no longer a collective educational activity, but rather it is a personalized guidance or auxiliary tool that never goes away. In distributed classrooms, learners gradually begin to break free from the shackles of schools so as to construct cognition and knowledge systems through active learning.

The traditional teaching model is centered on teachers and teaching materials, while the distributed classroom integrates education into the living environment. Students need to take the initiative to accept information and knowledge, which in turn helps them to develop the skill to solve practical problems by identifying and processing information. The distributed classroom places greater demands upon students, as they are required to assume more responsibilities in their own process of learning in a collaborative context. At the same time, they are responsible for higher-level management functions in the classroom, such as the evaluation of their peers’ work and the selection of their future curriculum (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7.

Distributed teaching process compared with the current process.

4 Conclusion and Future Work

Design is a prototype innovation that includes artistic feelings, innovative ideas, thinking, the ability to express externalization, and the ability to intervene in reality, rather than simply “art design” that is focused on expressive forms.

While simply replacing the traditional teaching model may be unrealistic, the training of talented designers based on the design collaborative organization is indeed moving in the direction of distribution and fragmentation. With the vast information resources available nowadays, the role of designers has gradually become diversified, such that they now require comprehensive capabilities which are unlikely to be completely taught in traditional teaching. Design education is bound to integrate social environmental resources, while also developing into a new form that combines the systematic characteristics of school education with the distribution and fragmentation of E-learning.

Distributed-type in design education has both its advantages and disadvantages. It requires proper implements such as computer configuration and higher network speed, while providing massive learning resources. It may widen the knowledge-gap and become a part of educational inequity. As future work, we plan to propose a teaching model that is suitable for design training both inside and outside of the school, reducing the digital divide by refining as far as possible all the different aspects of the model.