March 2008 - Issue #1
The Future By Design
Story by Brad Collis
View articles in related topics: Design, Film, Multimedia, Education
Australia has no Silicon Valley in which to place a design school and reap the world-changing innovations that have come from such an association in the US, but to one of the most acclaimed design pioneers, Ken Friedman, you can design your way across any obstacle, including geographic isolation.
To Friedman, a central figure in Fluxus - the international laboratory for inter-media art, architecture, design, literature and music - design is the man-made matrix in which all are accommodated.
Design, even of a geographic nature, is a challenge; and to Friedman, challenge is pretty much the purpose of life.
This is why he has forsaken a seemingly idyllic work and lifestyle in Norway, where as a professor at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo and at the Design Research Center at Denmark's Design School in Copenhagen, he was employed to spend a considerable amount of time thinking - such is his reputation as one of the great design innovators and educators of his time.
Yet Friedman has moved from Norway to Australia, with a plan to transform the design school at a small Melbourne-based university, Swinburne University of Technology, into a global centre for design excellence and innovation.
Friedman has no desire to create the biggest design faculty but he is certainly determined to have it rank among the best: to attract the brightest students and best teachers and awaken the likes of Silicon Valley to his new workplace and its people. Friedman accepted the position of dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne late last year after a meeting in Amsterdam with Swinburne's Vice-Chancellor, Ian Young. His decision was strongly influenced by Professor Young's still-active involvement in research: "He told me he wanted to build a pre-eminent design school ... well anyone would say that, but in 2006 he was awarded an Australia Research Council Discovery Grant as a research scientist and that told me what kind of leadership Swinburne has," Friedman explains. "I did some more research and came to the conclusion that this really could become an extraordinary university of the future."
In the months since then, Friedman has been formulating his ideas on design education in the context of some of the overarching issues facing the world - global warming principal among them - along with emerging technologies in the digital and nano-fields.
It could be said that human imagination has never had such a broad and expanding field on which to play, but to be useful it needs discipline and to have been properly forged by academic rigour. To this end, Friedman has already announced that the Swinburne design school will be moving to the '3-plus-2' Bologna model. This will eventually mean that becoming a 'Swinburne designer' will require a three-year bachelor degree followed by a two-year masters degree.
"I accept that, initially, many of our three-year graduates will head overseas for their masters, but that will change as we develop the curriculum's international standing and recruit some of the stellar international figures I am already talking to as professors and faculty members," Friedman says.
He argues that for professional designers to take on the responsibilities that he believes they must, then a three-year undergraduate education is simply not adequate. His reasoning is that it is designers who will be pivotal to locking in a more efficient, equitable and sustainable use of the planet's diminishing resources. He wants to nurture designers who can step beyond learned skills and principles to instead conceive, research and apply new paradigms.
Of course, when Friedman speaks of design his reach is wide. Yes, it involves the innate talents that give form and shape to artefacts, but that in itself is an evolving definition. Friedman has recently co-authored a book that takes the notion of artefacts far beyond "chairs, products and websites".
"Ken Freidman is one of our foremost thinkers in design today. He has been a major contributor to the design community; a prolific writer and staunch supporter of design research and higher degrees in design education."
Lorraine Justice, Phd
Director, School of Design. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
"Many of the artefacts being created today are invisible, embedded deep within digital systems, but they still shape how people work, feel and interact," he says. "There are also what we call behavioural artefacts. In fact for me, one of the great design artefacts of the 20th century was the replacement of single queues in front of each service desk at places like banks and airport check-in counters with a single queue servicing all windows. In terms of time and money savings this is a great artefact, and it is just the redesign of a process."
Friedman says a principle that will make Swinburne different to other design schools is that it will be asking "how do we design, and what do we design so that when we design we think systemically, for everyone involved in the system". This means understanding fully the knock-on effect from concept through to every aspect of manufacturing and use through to the end stage. If it is a physical product how is it disassembled and recycled, or if it is a digital artefact what does it do to all the systems in which it gets embedded?
"Everything we touch and work with is intrinsic to a way of life, or shapes a way of life. That is the essence of design."
Friedman says the Swinburne curriculum is being remoulded to have an international presence based on evidence-based research (including research into improved ways of teaching design) and global sustainability.
By way of example, he asks: "How does a design school contribute to a world that is at much greater risk from global warming than even the United Nations has so far projected?" He points out that scientists examining past eras when global temperatures reached the levels now being predicted, have calculated that sea levels will be 20 times higher than the one or two metres mooted by the UN.
To Friedman, this looms as probably the greatest challenge ever faced by the world's designers who, he says, will need to question and re-think the whole built environment.
Part of this will require broadening the culture of design principles beyond western values. He makes the point that if seven billion people aspire to drive fuel-guzzling American cars, the planet's resource load would be consumed in minutes if they ever achieved that goal.
"So design needs to incorporate anthropology and a wide cultural influence, including 'respect for the Earth' philosophies and design processes that are inherent in indigenous cultures. There are a lot of issues facing us that are cultural and philosophical, as well as commercial and entrepreneurial."
Friedman is under no illusions that such an aspiration faces considerable institutional and societal obstacles, but the challenge reflects his attraction to Swinburne. It is not in the 'group of eight', the largest and most prominent of Australia's universities, but Friedman says he was drawn to Swinburne's agility: "To get things right it doesn't have too much legacy to combat. Its size means people can get together to think through the important decisions and to manage change in such a way that if something isn't working it can be dropped." On a personal note, yes he will miss the life he and his wife created in Scandinavia, but a new door opened and curiosity turned to opportunity. The future, after all, is what you design.
PROFILE
Ken Friedman
Ken Friedman has been at the centre of experimental media since the emergence of Fluxus in the 1960s. His work is represented in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Tate Modern in London and the Stadtsgalerie, Stuttgart. Friedman received his Master of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in education, psychology and social science from San Francisco State University in 1971. He received his doctorate in 1976 from the United States International University. In 2007, he received an honorary doctoral degree from Loughborough University in the UK. In the 1970s he was director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Contemporary Art, San Diego, and during the mid-1980s was president of the Art Economist Corporation in New York.
