Responding to a long-standing need for more qualified designers in the Pacific Northwest, the University of Oregon will be opening the doors of its new Product Design program this coming June. In an energetic phone interview last week, Zara Logue, the Portland representative for the program, described a uniquely hybrid program combining faculty and strategic guidance from U of O's vibrant architecture and art programs with active involvement from major companies in Oregon's burgeoning creative economy.
"It really is kind of like Voltron," she wryly observed, noting that all three elements--art, architecture and business--have been heavily involved since the idea for the program began germinating nearly five years ago. And like any compound battle mecha worth its mega-thrusters, the new major takes several institutions that have already shown success on their own, and builds a new entity that attempts to take advantage of all of them.
The most unusual part of the program's story may indicate a growing trend in design education: a curriculum derived largely from the needs of the industry, rather than a legacy of theoretical guidelines. The imbalance between design education and design employment in the Pacific Northwest, and the Portland area in particular, has been discussed and commented on for years. Oregon's largest employer and its largest locally-headquartered company--Intel and Nike, respectively--both rely heavily on creative professionals of various stripes, but have long looked to distant schools to supply them.
For Industrial Design, the best-established school in the region is at Western Washington University, in Bellingham near the Canadian border: a small but solid program (this year's senior class is 12 students strong) that sends graduates to local companies like Microsoft, Teague and Fluke. While rigorous, it is by no means sufficient to meet the demands of the region's design-driven innovators, even when joined by younger programs at the University of Washington and the Portland branch of the Art Institute. The noise that Oregon and Washington companies have been making about the education gap has become an ongoing racket in the background of the regional design scene, audible at regional conferences and in casual conversation. So it was with great gusto that these and other companies responded to U of O's request for a symposium in 2004 to help determine the structure of the new program.
According to Logue, the results of the symposium and its attendant exploratory measures were surprising, to both school and industry. Although insisting early on that specific technical skills in visualization were top priorities for any Product Design curriculum, industry representatives changed their focus after examining U of O's Digital Arts program. "They came in saying, you know, 'We want a solid, practical skill base,'" says Logue, "But when we showed them these conceptual projects from Digital Arts, everyone stopped and went 'No, that's what we need, that kind of thoughtfulness.' Which was odd, because none of what we were showing them was actually product design."
Drawing heavily from these discussions, as well as a few decades of experience running an art and architecture school, U of O finally settled on an unusual two-part program. The first, centered at the main campus in Eugene, offers a four-year BA with conceptual learning described above on top of a standard foundation of visualization and industry-specific skills. The second, more industry-responsive part, is a one-year extension based in the historic White Stag Block in the Portland's Old Town neighborhood. That the university has put so much effort into renovating this local landmark suggests a clear understanding of the importance of branding and professional community engagement in a successful design program. The one-year program will take BA graduates from Eugene into something much closer to the design profession, immersing them in one of the nation's fastest-growing creative economies, and placing them in studios next to experienced designers, to whom the program will also be made open. Both are confronted with a research-based studio year, and granted a BFA at the end of it.
They're also expected to work. Another result of all the industry involvement is a serious internship program; all BFA students are expected to complete one before graduating, and a number of local companies have already pledged dedicated internship slots--paid ones--to make it happen. It's a diverse list for such a small city: Intel, Ziba, Columbia Sportswear, Adidas--which located its North American Headquarters in North Portland, award-winning medical cart manufacturer Modo, environmental design firm Mayer/Reed, and digital design studio Second Story, in addition to an existing relationship with Gucci's design center in London. Logue points to both the symposium and the existing tradition of apprenticeship in architecture programs as influences on this program.
Incorporating a co-op or internship component into a design program is certainly nothing new: University of Cincinnati's much lauded co-op program has been around in some form since 1906, and requires 6 full quarters of work experience from their undergraduates before granting an ID diploma. What Oregon is doing is different; they're not just going to the potential employers of their graduates to get internships, they've been involving them in the process of program design since the first day, and this has little precedent. There's no real surprise that one of the outcomes of this collaboration was an ingrained requirement of professional experience. But some of the other features of the program--the two-part BA/BFA, the decision to bring students out of the college town and into the Big City, the "stacked" curriculum that builds conceptual exploration on top of technical competence--would probably be markedly different if not for the involvement of industry.
Whether this is an encouraging development is up for debate. There's no doubt that an excessively theoretical, academic design program will produce graduates poorly prepared to design real products. This is a professional degree, after all, and there's a reason that Nike's internship program, for example, draws heavily from European schools. Within the administrative offices of many design schools, professors and provosts argue passionately about how much industry response is too much, and the conclusions vary. A curriculum built solely to address the needs of future employers is a brittle one, solving problems that exist currently but doing little to prepare students for the unforeseen needs of the future. This is why design theory is still taught: like a liberal arts education, the goal is not so much to grant skills, as to grant the ability to identify and absorb new skills later on.
Where the proper balance lies between current needs and future flexibility is the crux of the debate in design education, and one that U of O's embryonic program, with its deep academic roots, seems to be taking seriously. Whether this hybrid juggernaut turns out to be a whole that exceeds its parts, or crumbles under real world pressures, is a question that will take several years to answer. In the meantime, a large fraction of the design economy, in the Northwest and beyond, will be paying close attention.
