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Erik: What opportunity do you see to improve how design schools teach?
Jon: Ah there’s a lot of opportunity for designs schools to improve how they teach.
The – there’s a number of different conversations occurring right now in traditional industrial
design circles and then traditional prints or graphic design circles alluding to the
fact that there is a crisis of design education in the United States and I think this is true
in Europe too, to some degree although to a much lesser degree. Professors are teaching
what they learned. What they learned is deeply rooted in bauhaus form giving meaning color
theory and typography and 3D design and studio design. Those are all valuable things when
the artifact you’re making is a – an item, a mass produced object or a poster or an annual
report. Those are much, much less important when the problem you’re solving is access
to clean drinking water in the middle of Nairobi and so – and arguably, those aren’t important
at all, which is – which is a highly controversial thing to say in a graphic design circle, your
typography is not important. ‘Whoa! Wow! I don’t know about that.’ It’s gonna
take a lot of old dogs learning new tricks or a lot of new dogs to really get the type
of new design education paradigm as a norm in the United States. There are some notable
exceptions to that but most of those notable exceptions are coming out of Sweden, Finland,
Denmark. I think the program at Malmö University in Sweden, the program at CID in Copenhagen,
there’s a – the chaos pilots program in Denmark, all of them are focusing on a much
broader sense of how design thinking and design doing play a role in – in large scale problem
solving. I spent about six weeks in Malmö University and they’re working with a very
small area a town called Rosengård which is the first stop for a great deal of immigrants
that are leaving the middle east. I’m not sure why? It doesn’t – I mean geographically,
it doesn’t make a lot of sense but there are some large percentage, disproportioned
percentage of unemployed immigrants, mostly women and children living in the city and
so the school, the university is working with them to understand, how they can empower them
to – to have the self esteem, to – to find a career path, to find a life path. Those
are problems worth solving and the end result is not a beautiful annual report for British
Petroleum, it’s something very, very different. The artifacts that are made to support that,
maybe a print piece, it maybe a website, it maybe a mobile phone application or it may
be just a system or a way of changing policy but all of those things required a designerly
approach.