Anonymous

Details

Skills

I am an Industrial designer by training and also have spent many years working within Branding consultancies, applying design to all aspect of the human brand experience from product and packaging to communications and environments. Over the years, I have been involved as a guest lecturer and tutor at various London colleges including UAL, RCA & Ravensbourne.

About

I am writing to be considered for the position of Associate Lecturer in MA design for Industry 5.0.
I have worked in the Design industry for more than 25 years with 10 years running my own studio. I do feel that it would be useful for those in Design education to learn about the design industry in the context of accelerating digital landscape as well as the current global economical model.

Although there are many more possibilities within the field of design, it has become quite a noisy and unwieldy environment. Not only do designers have to understand the current cultural and commercial landscape, we need to be able to present ideas with clarity, beyond our personal ego and likes, and consider how they impact our lives and communities. Ideas that are well liked, and can go viral are in abundance at the moment. But, for Design to remain pertinent, at the precipice of the AI age, design needs to lead thoughts and culture, as opposed to continually supply peripheral content to a culture constantly hungry for the next stimulation.

We do live in a complex world, and issues are ever more complicated to evaluate and explain. And yet, because of the speed of our current communications platforms, many issues are overly simplified with views very silo-ed. People’s attention spans have greatly reduced because of the sheer amount of information being generated. People have become either tribal or nomadic.

I do think that education plays a very crucial role in teaching students how to navigate this complexity. There is a fine line between training and education, and I think one keeps the other in-check. Design specifically is a very unique subject in that it is both academic and commercial. Training gives you the skill to carry out a certain task – at best it informs you why one does it that way. Education, however teaches you how to use your amassed knowledge to gain further knowledge… and sometimes to challenge that knowledge. To paraphrase Picasso, "learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist"

Investment in education is a long-term one. It can’t be changed in a couple of years. That said, despite problems that are going on all over the world, there are movements on many fronts that are re-evaluating how things are being done, and the speed in which they are being done at. More and more economists are starting to promote Economics of Sustainability instead of the Economics of Growth - a model we have been subscribing to for long while now.
Larger farms are being broken up into smaller ones, promoting more diverse forms of agriculture. New smaller vineyards are thriving in Europe because of new ways of selling to customers. Slow food gaining momentum in a world saturated with fast food.

Education is beginning to shift too, especially Higher Design Education. The amount of knowledge that a student needs to absorb now is immense and highly complex. On one hand, through digital platforms there are now many opportunities for cross-pollination, collaboration and exchange, and on the other hand, an individual to tell their isolated story, create their own introverted world.
Both ends of the spectrum will perpetuate an ever noisier world. This is where the education of “environmental circularity and planetary limitations” mentioned in your job brief becomes very important.

An important part of being a designer currently is not only to create products but is to be able to take a half step back and curate/edit this over-abundance of products and information we currently have. Traditionally, this curation and editorial process in based on production efficiency and financial viability, but more and more, we need to balance those with cultural, environmental and humanistic criterias.

As Designers, we need to become less egotistical and isolationist. There was a time when clients used to consult designers for our thinking, even our advice on aesthetics & style. Having creative direction is one of the core of being a designer, but in this age of “Big data” and AI, we also need to hone our curatorial skills, to help navigate the very complex and plentiful world we live in. Navigation not through more algorithms, but through understanding what makes us humans.

The balance of creation and curation is a big interest of mine and I would love the opportunity to explore that within an academic environment with designers preparing for their career within the field – a field that has been so focussed on creation and production. This is not a manifesto but hopefully a self-aware behavioural change for all of us in the design community.