With technology obliterating boundaries between disciplines, design education is in turmoil. Anne Burdick, chair of the graduate Media Design Program at California’s Art Center College of Design published a long essay on Adobe's Design Center on how some design programs are responding creatively---and encouraging students to do the same. The article quotes two people who are well known in Piedmont: Gillian Crampton Smith, founder of the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and Bruce Sterling, the futurologist/science fiction writer currently living in Torino:

”In the late eighties, Masters students critiqued the status quo to shake up their thinking about design. In Europe and America, students and design critics were busy arguing about the value of post-structural theory, legibility, the vernacular, and deconstruction. The most influential graduate programs were form and theory playgrounds whose impact on the profession was marked by new stylistic genres while the theoretical critique endured in the classroom. In the midst of all this, Gillian Crampton Smith introduced the MA in Computer-Related Design at the Royal College of Art in 1989 (which later became the first degree in Interaction Design), and a new imperative for graduate education began to emerge. Though few in the established design domains—product, environmental, and communication design—understood it at the time, the status quo was about to deconstruct on its own.

This is now. From the techno-cultural inevitability of Bruce Sterling’s “amazingly different world” to the design ascendancy of Bruce Mau’s “Massive Change,” the future of design looks nothing like it used to, not even for a pioneer like Crampton Smith. Forces ranging from ubiquitous computing to the global design marketplace, merging media, and new modes of literacy have rendered disciplinary boundaries obsolete. Designers are shifting from the design of artifacts in isolation to the design of interconnected nodes in elaborate systems, whether YouTube videos or “breathing” buildings. Masters students are no longer a source of curiosity to the profession—they are busy fleshing out the future of their disciplines, one project at a time. As the Chair of the graduate program in Media Design at Art Center College of Design, I grapple daily with how to prepare students for this complex, fluid reality and the work that is expected of them.”


Meanwhile Business Week has published a long profile of Anne Kirah, former design anthropologist at Microsoft, and now Dean of the new Danish school called 180°academy, where she is “shaking managers out of their traditional ways of doing things and forcing them, perhaps for the first time, to understand their customers’ cultures and to discern their needs.”

Also Kirah has a bit of a tie with Torino. A few years back she visited the city as part of her MSN Messenger user research projects while she was still at Microsoft.

Here is how the article starts off:

“In September about 20 executives, mostly from Scandinavia, hopped on a plane for a trip designed to shatter their notions of how to do business. The group, comprised of the first batch of students at a new Danish school called 180°academy, jetted off to South Africa. There they worked with a group called the Business Place to help would-be entrepreneurs realize such dreams as opening a hair salon or starting a toy business, though they had no relevant experience or skills.
The program isn’t anything like business school, where students focus largely on areas of their expertise. And that’s the point. Conventional business education leads executives to build on their strengths—improving profit margins, boosting efficiency, and benchmarking the best practices of rivals. This school aims to teach midcareer executives something many think is unteachable: how to be innovative. “We’ve got to break them from what they know best,” says Anne Kirah, the academy’s kinetic, gum-chewing, American dean. “When you’re only focused on your competition and what you know best, you don’t innovate.”