Designing isn’t something you can learn by having it explained to you. It’s something you must learn from experience. You can only learn how to do it by doing it. This creates a paradoxical situation. Design students find themselves in a predicament. They must start doing without knowing how to. They must accept that there is something they need to learn without knowing what skills and habits, exactly, their desired expertise entails, or how they’ll know whether they’ve learned it.
Teachers of design find themselves on the other side of this same frustrating, paradoxical situation. You cannot teach design, or any other complex skill, for that matter, by teaching it. Not if teaching means explaining or transferring knowledge. You can’t even explain why, exactly, the exercises you assign are important because learning how they are useful can only happen by looking back at having done them.
This paradox and predicament is described by Donald Schön (in The Design Studio and in Educating the Reflective Pracitioner). His analysis helps to explain one of the trickier situations in design education.
When there is an aspect of design expertise that a student hasn’t started to grasp yet, there is little point in arguing with them about what they’ve missed or done wrong. There is a fundamental problem of communication here between design students and teachers, Schön tells us. It is simply impossible for the teacher to put what they want to say into words that the student can, at this point in their development, understand.
How do we break through this barrier?
The only effective way forward for a design teacher in such a situation, I think, is (1) to think of an activity that is likely to provide the student with the experience they need to start to understand what they don’t yet see, (2) to organize that the student engages in this activity, and (3) to help the student to reflect on the relevant aspects of their experience by making them explicit.
This inevitably includes giving instructions that the student will need to accept on their face, without understanding why they need to do these things. The teacher must sometimes appeal to their authority as experts, not being able to justify their suggestions. They may even be unable to adequately explain what it is they want their student to do, and may need to fall back on indirect means, asking for one thing in the hope that its production will trigger a completely different activity.