The Real Tragedy of Design Education: A response Jony Ive's statements

“So many of the designers that we interview don't know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and computers are cheaper. That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.” - Jony Ive

"Design Education is Tragic Says  Jony Ive"

This is the quote from Apple industrial designer Jonathan Ive being shared this past week.  You can read the full article about his recent talk in the UK. As a design educator I have two different responses, one is to the content of his message and secondly to the messenger that it is coming from.

First off, the statement is a broad generalization of every design school in the world, which is unfair.  Design schools are quite different from each other, each with it own focus and philosophy of educational methodology. Although this generalization is his perception based on the portfolios that he has seen.  And when one views many portfolios, they start to all look the same, and slick CAD photorealistic renderings tend to blur together and lose their impact.

Which leads me to the thrust of Ive’s argument, which is that today's students aren’t making enough, modeling things, physical things, with their hands.  If we generalize all industrial design (ID) schools together, then yes I would agree, but in some schools, like my own, that is not true.

If you go back to the history of ID education in the USA, it’s foundation was a collusion of sculpture, engineering and industry.  These distinct forces collide and compete for dominance within any design. Utility, structure, economy and  beauty.  But sculpture,  three dimensional form, was always a key component. But how do you teach an understanding of form? How do you develop a  sensitivity to visual relationships in space?  I think that this is the key question that Rowena Reed Kostellow asked when forming her curriculum at Carnegie Institute and Pratt Institute in the 1940s.  And her answer was that students need to manipulate forms, by hand, in three dimensional space.  They need to do this with deliberate intention, with constraints and extreme sensitivity to proportions, and how we perceive and approach objects.

Not a CAD model - spatial form abstraction by Western ID student

This means making forms with your hands, many forms, out of paper, foamcore, wood, foam, clay, wire, cardboard, etc.  Which is what we do at Western, in many classes and studios.  It’s hard, and it’s messy, it’s frustrating, and it’s time consuming, but ultimately it works.  As a student myself at Pratt I didn’t really understand what I was doing or why it was relevant, until much later. That’s when I really appreciated it.

On the other hand there’s the lure of CAD modelling and rendering.  You can create anything you can imagine and regardless of physics you can make it look like a real photograph of an imaginary object.  It’s clean, it’s fast, and it looks great on the screen.  A shortcut to beautiful images that you can drop right into your portfolio!  

also not a CAD model - Reading bench by Larisa Schulz, Western ID student, now designer at Ziba

But the problem is the lack of connection to real physical space, three dimensional visual relationships and engineering and manufacturing constraints.  I think that this is because in order to understand three dimensional form, you need to feel it, hold it in your hands and process it with your two eyes.  Something that we can’t do on the screen. (but maybe with virtual reality that will be possible). So, yes, in that respect, Ive is right.  Too many students go straight to the computer and create CAD renderings whose beauty is only two dimensional and shallow.

My second issue is with the messenger.  Sir Jonathan Ive is isolated in his ivory Apple tower.  Even when invited multiple times by the IDSA, he declines to participate in any design education or design community event in the US. No conferences, no talks, no presentations, no volunteering, no meetings, no portfolio reviews, nothing.  I was on the Board of IDSA, so I know that we tried. Many of the top industrial designers in the US are involved and respected members of the design community, so there isn’t much excuse. So, when he complains about the state of design education, they ring hollow to us as a community of designers.  Because he has separated himself, as some holy royal who won’t lower himself to  associate with the rest of us.

So, if he wants to see improvement, why not do something about it?  There is an attitude among some professionals about design education, that schools are a service provider, and they aren’t doing a good job, and so they complain.  But somehow, those professionals graduated just in time, before education went downhill.  We tend to forget that we are all products of education, but our education doesn’t end upon graduation.  We continue to learn about design on the job. So we improve and forget that what we learned in school was just the beginning. Without the foundation that ID education provides, we can’t continue to build on that knowledge.

The real tragedy here is that there is a brokenness and a disconnect between education and industry.  It can’t continue to be a one way street.  Industry can’t keep adding to it’s list of demands without helping out.  Schools are struggling to pay decent wages, to maintain high tech labs and shops, to keep class sizes low, to pay for the computers and software they need.  So if you’re a design professional who is disappointed with the graduates that you're interviewing, then connect with your favorite design school, try to help out, get involved, get your company to donate to their program.  Don’t just demand more and complain, because that definitely won’t make positive change.