The Purpose of Design Education is a project that questions the subject of Design itself, and what designers (and future designers) want the purpose of their work to be. We created an application and a printed element that work together in aiding those that seek help in these matters and want to read and think about them.
All this emerged from reading the text ‘Towards a Critical Faculty’, by Stuart Bailey, a designer that went through this very same process: he felt the need to stop and assess what he was doing so that he could move forward in the direction he wanted. The search for a purpose becomes vital to the development of future work.
In the printed element the user can read the text by Stuart Bailey, giving him a deeper understanding of the author’s struggles and a starting point to some questions that are important for the moment of reflection. It is also meant to be used as an endpoint: it includes our conclusion that is the result of the journey through both elements and attempts to define what the purpose of design education really is.
The application is a collection of texts that is meant to be used as a source of information on three sub-questions we asked ourselves:
Should teaching be more towards small-c culture, or big-C culture?
Is a broader encompassing of other social studies fields necessary and desirable for art/design education?
The question now is what should we teach, what should they learn?
