Taking Design Home With You

9. September 2009 by justdanika.

Designing in another country is a great learning experience for foreign designers. First and foremost, all the references that the professors use and the students laugh about, as they are well known towns and products in the Netherlands, I have never seen before. They laugh about a town that “looks classic” but was built quite recently in order to give the same feeling of community as the old towns possess. They joke about a toy that looks like a blob with a face. The term classic is a loosely defined term that’s references differ from culture to culture as much as the language.

I wonder how one might teach design without a filter and what other references should be presented in a class to better prepare the students for global work. In the classes here in Delft, similar to mine at Stanford, they almost never reference design in Asia and if they do it is only in very recent terms. One might reference something of Japan or Korea with reverence but rarely China. China is a culture with a long history of craft. It has emerged more how their design is affected by their culture and history, but students rarely learn about it. Not to mention, how come you never hear about Australia in design?

Currently reading Design Inspired Innovation, it defines a classic design as a long-lived design that anchors and stabilizes the evolution of a firm’s product family. If the purpose of a classic is to give a base-line of what a good design is and classic is defined by culture, it may imply that doing cross-cultural design is the only way to really design for someone else. If you don’t get the culture, you can’t design for them. This I tend to agree with. It also means that students that go abroad to study design, though they may bring back some techniques and tools that can be helpful, they may not have studied their own culture enough to design for it.

With over 40 years of design history at Technical University Delft, it is easy to understand why they think their education system is effective. The program has Alumni that are lead designers at Philips, a CEO at BMW, and entrepreneurs starting companies based on their projects during school. Does this program output very specific types of designers and how will the international students be perceived when they return to their countries? Will they lack the knowledge of how to apply the design process to their own very difference culture? Can they mold the ideology they are taught into something they can utilize and share with others back at home?

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