Designing Education

Grant McCracken's blog is a daily dose of stimulating thinking.  Yesterday, he wrote about the MIT Comparative Media Studies program's attempt to address a deep historical theme:

We have a problem in higher education.  Students must now choose between cultural studies and professional studies (specifically, business school).

If they choose the former, they swear off real engagement (and full employment) in the world.  If they choose latter, they swear off a deeper knowledge of the culture in which they will compete.

This is a long standing problem.  It plays out that distinction between the "world renouncing" liberal arts and the "world embracng" professional studies.  But it is a problem that has been made more grevious by two things: the continual retreat from the world performed by cultural studies and the continual interpenetration of culture and commerce in the marketplace.  The rapproachment of the two fields is, in other words, both more difficult and more urgent.

I've written about  my own lifelong quest for a discipline whose scope transcended parochial boundaries.  I think design has the opportunity to develop a modern creative synthesis. 

In their attempts to illuminate hidden recesses, designers routinely bash the either/or thinking that places objects, icons, and ideas into "high/low," or "serious/playful" culture categories.  This is one of the true pleasures of great design: to demonstrate the unity the exists beyond distinctions. 

Target has used this notion (design transcends pricepoint) to establish a powerful modern brand.  Business leaders being developed in today's business schools (or designers coming out of design programs) need to search for solutions that fuse the cultural, aesthetic and economic dimensions of modern life.  As Grant points out, this is both difficult and urgent.

But, inspiration is too precious to be wasted because of the thinly veiled snobbery of artificial categorization.

Tags: Design Either/Or Thinking