Introduction: Design, what it does, who it matters to, how UT does it

hy does your car look the way it does? Or your house? How about your town? Or your shoes? Or your toaster or your favorite pen? What chain of events and circumstances led to the creation of your new chair? Why'd you buy it?

At first these might just seem like mundane questions—they're so basic that we don't usually give them much thought. But the answer to all of them is, in a word, design. Someone thought about them and made them the way they are. Art met function; utility met aesthetics, and on the other side, you have your object or place. Everything—literally every single thing made by man—was, at some point, designed. Someone sat down and thought about not only how it should be made, but why it was being made and what form it should take. Sometimes this process results in an object of surpassing beauty and utility, and sometimes it results in a dud. And the difference is usually made by designer's understanding of all the factors that come together to create demand and fulfill it.

So who's charged with such an important task? What kind of training do they need and where do they get it? How can you tackle something that's so big it can only be described with such a basic and formless word like "design"?

The professors in the Design Division of the Department of Art and Art History have a pretty good idea of how to go about it, but it's different from the path that most design programs choose. Where most schools focus on a practical, skills-based education for designers, the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a holistic, non-vocational, and genuinely revolutionary approach, which they hope will have broad influence on the design industry, and ultimately on higher education in general.

A formal program, a different way

The division was created in the early 1990s to serve a growing demand for formal courses in graphic art design. For about four years prior to that, a few studio professors, led by Ed Triggs, had taught a group of courses in illustration, typography and production, and publication design. As these courses became more popular, the department saw a need for a separate division. What these people were doing wasn't exactly studio art—it was artistic, but there was a built-in consideration of use, of practicality, and of human interaction that just didn't quite fit into the studio curricula.

The division that the department was developing would be different from other design programs. At that time, design had, according to design professor Miodrag Mitrasinovic, a "stigma of commercialism." Many felt it was bound to mass consumption, propaganda, and advertising, and Triggs wanted to see something different. He was instrumental in the hiring of the nascent division's first tenure-track faculty member, Randy Shearer, who later went on to become Dean of the Parsons School of Design in New York. Together, Triggs and Shearer worked to create a program that would make designers aware of how meaning is created and negotiated—at both ends of the design process. They brought in faculty members with diverse backgrounds, seeking people with formal training in traditional design areas like graphic arts and furniture design, but who also had degrees or research experience in political science, family studies, and critical theory. This approach was risky then, and others in the field still see it that way now, but the design faculty believe in what they're doing. They feel they best serve their students and the world at large by providing as broad a grounding as possible. "We're trying to teach our students how to think," says professor Chris Taylor, "how to approach the world."

A few semesters back, the division created a course with partnership with mechanical engineering. Called [TK COURSE NAME], the class takes a group of students from both design and mechanical engineering, and gives them a large-scale problem to think through and design on together. In the spring of 2005, the class, which meets for eight hours a week, is working on a proposal for renovating the College of Fine Arts library.

When I arrive one morning in early February, the class has been divided into groups, and each group is giving a presentation on a certain section of the factors a renovation will involve. Using a Power Point presentation and clips from a PBS video, one group outlines just about everything the class needs to know about disabilities. After all, people with disabilities will be primary users of the library, and the regulatory environment in which the library will exist—the university, the state, the USA—specifically requires that disabled patrons have access to the same facilities as non-disabled ones. The group gives summaries of all the mental and physical disabilities the library and its staff are likely to encounter. They go over causes, effects, numbers in the general population, numbers at UT, and then get into societal treatment, giving a rundown on general attitudes toward physically and mentally handicapped people throughout the entirety of western civilization, from contemporary attitudes all the way back through Roman times. The sheer amount of information is staggering, and it's hard to believe that all of this matters. After all, aren't they just worrying about wheelchair ramps and computer screen-readers? Why do we need to know how societies treated crippled people in the middle ages?

According to the class' design professor, Miodrag Mitrasinovic, everything the class talks about is essential to coming up with a good design. "Really simple considerations, like cost, dictate that you know everything you can about your subject," he points out. "It's a lot cheaper to think through these things now than to find out too late that you made some costly mistake in the design process simply because you didn't gather all possible information." So in the designer's mind, knowing how a society has treated disabled people in the past can have a lot to do with knowing how to design a space that will be used by people with and without disabilities.

Why design matters

Designers are fond of saying that everything we design as human beings comes from, and ends up as part of, our "web of relationships." Consider the placement of streets, parks, and neighborhoods in a city. Thousands of things affect the final look of a map—City Hall's financial constraints, environmental impact reports, traffic needs, citizen surveys, backroom real-estate deals, lobbying, architecture. It's an enormous process, and at first glance it might seem as organized and cohesive as a herd of cats, but the fact is that each step happened the way it did for a reason. That street or neighborhood or park was placed where it was because it lives in a vast web of relationships—historical, financial, emotional, and aesthetic connections that give objects and places meaning and shape how we, as consumers and citizens feel about them. Design is always a process of moving through that web and understanding the connections. But the strands in the web aren't always obvious.

Take the personal computer. For most of its history, the personal computer was a gray or beige block—an ugly, incredibly useful machine that muscled its way into prominence on desks throughout the world. Their look was dictated by utility (beige and gray being colors calculated to least offend office color schemes), so their actual aesthetics were irrelevant. If the guts were what counted, who cared what it looked like? A computer was nothing more than what you did with it. You lived with this ugly thing squatting on your desk because everyone had to have one.

But as computers found their way into the home, the idea that they had no personal weight, no emotional role to fill in the lives of users, became more and more suspect. People were using computers to communicate with distant loved ones, to make Christmas cards, to play games, to produce albums of photos, and these kinds of uses were only going to get bigger. So if the personal computer could be made more personal, perhaps people would purchase technology based on the same emotional foundations on which they choose clothes, shoes, cars, and wristwatches.

In 1998, Apple Computer bet money on it, releasing a compact, translucent teal, all-in-one computer called the iMac. At the time, the press was split over whether this move would change personal computers we as knew them or finally bankrupt the perpetually foundering Apple. It turned out to be the former.

Just 18 months after its release, the iMac became the bestselling personal computer in history, moving quickly through three editions and spawning a galaxy of hastily engineered knock-offs. Suddenly, color was the big thing. Companies from Hewlett Packard to Compaq to Epson were rushing to bring out computers and peripheral devices in an array of colors, and the personalization of personal computers had finally begun.

After sales proved that people really did want to identify with and bestow affection upon these devices, in the way they tended to with other household appliances, the pundits came out explaining why this had been obvious all along. The average office worker, they pointed out, spends a majority of her workday in front of a computer. Americans aged 18-30 are increasingly spending their leisure time in front of computers rather than televisions, and we had long ago decided it was an imperative to make televisions look cool. When you thought about it, it was a no-brainer: people wanted good-looking computers for the same reason they wanted good-looking cars and couches and television sets—they spent so much time with them that they had become something for which mere utilitarianism was no longer enough.

So the web of relationships can be complicated. The iMac didn't succeed because it was a different color or because it was a smaller computer; it succeeded because it was able to imbed itself in the web of relationships in a logical way. Apple's designers analyzed the web of relationships and perceived a need, and that perception turned out to be accurate. Considering all aspects of an object's roles, consequences, and genesis can make the difference between something spectacular and a spectacular failure—both in terms of money spent to create the object and in the less easily quantified metric of the object's success in meeting a specific need.

Part III: Universal design education

The central tenet of design is deliberateness—the idea that everything is done for a reason, and that you need to understand and anticipate those reasons so you can shape the process. After all, design isn't just prettying things up. "Design gets a bad name when designers 'decorate,'" says professor Dan Olsen, "when they design just to give something form—not to reveal its implications as an object, space, or piece of communication."

To the students and professors of the design division, designing is a profound process whose most visible and accessible impacts unfortunately don't often extend, for the outside observer, past the superficial. "Because of the perception of design as decoration," Olsen says, "People tend not to think about the objects around them—that their form has meaning, that the functional and formal aspect of these items affect the world."

Affecting the world is something you'll hear designers talk about a lot; they're nothing if not cognizant of the fact that the things humans make have an effect on both their users their users' societies. Professor Chris Taylor brings this back to the idea of deliberateness, at an almost pan-species level. "We're driving this thing," he says. "Even if we're asleep at the wheel, we do have control. Design means acknowledging that we have control over our own development—nothing is happenstance."

This is the attitude that keeps the division focused on the general principles of design as opposed to the vocational skills used in the professional design world. And they've taken some heat for it; graduates often report having a more difficult time in the job market than they probably would had they gone through a vocational design program. Specialization in an area of design with workplace utility doesn't truly begin until an undergrad designer's senior year, happening almost concurrently with a mandatory internship class and the beginning of the job search. The division also doesn't offer a professional graduate degree—it grants a master of fine arts in design—and it isn't accredited as a "professional" design program. But these factors don't appear to matter much to potential students; the division received fifty-five applications this year for three open spaces in the incoming graduate class, and students continue to apply for entry into the undergrad program in growing numbers. The division's commitment to general design appears to be paying off among its students, and even to some extent in the staid world of traditional design education—some of the faculty have been invited to help develop classes for established professional schools like Parsons.

"Society in general seems aimed at professional programs," Mitrasinovic says, "but you still need a way to produce people who are trained comprehensively." Design is such a prevalent activity, such a necessary component of so many jobs, that the faculty believe that the same basic argument for liberal arts education—that a thorough background for general analysis is preferable to immediately applicable vocational training—also holds true for design. If the world that we make as human beings is to be one truly suited to our nature and our proclivities, then the educational process must be founded upon the design virtues of deliberateness and pervasive understanding. "We attempt to educate future designers as comprehensive and reflective thinkers, citizens, and intellectuals," Mitrasinovic says. "We're not exotic at all—we're a very normal, regular program. We do things a different way, but every program should work like this."