Or: Due Process for Design Criticism
At the end of one of the design courses I used to teach, students presented to tutors that had never seen their work, and their presentations were graded by those tutors. I’ve always found this an interesting exercise; students are forced to present a coherent case because they can’t rely on the shared understanding they’ve built up with their regular tutor during the project, and tutors aren’t tempted to let that same shared understanding influence what is supposed to be an assessment of what’s presented – and only what’s presented.
The whole thing is tricky business, though.
Design inevitably includes deciding what aspects of a problem are most important, and which should be less of a concern or are even going to be, for the most part, ignored. And being unfamiliar with the work, chances are that quite a few tutors are going to criticise students’ designs on exactly these aspects: the ones that jump out at them as obvious oversights, but which turn out to be quite consciously ignored or left as suboptimal in the final design. This often leads to lively discussions. After all, if students did their job, they’ll be able to defend their choices and point to considerations or discoveries they weren’t able to discuss in time available for their initial presentation. These debates, of course, are what make design crits such a powerful excercise.
But the time for those discussions is limited, and there’s the hitch: when afterwards, tutors go off to get a cup of coffee to sit down and grade the presentations, perhaps together with a colleague, they’re bound to see still more weak points. Why on Earth weren’t these two parts integrated into the housing for instance? And isn’t it rather stupid of these students to have overlooked a glaringly difficult step in the assembly process? Perhaps. But perhaps, of course, not.
Obviously, the main points of a design, its construction and assembly, should have been clearly presented, but there’s never time to present all considerations. And design tutors, in my experience, have a habit to keep looking for points of criticism instead of dwelling on the elements of a design they’ve already been convinced of as being solid. And if they’re any good at what they do, they’ll have no trouble at all putting their finger on the weaker points of a proposal. But it’s often far from obvious whether these are actually examples of shoddy work or whether they’re perhaps the result of some defensible and well-considered compromise.
And finding out whether something is defensible requires, at the very least, it seems to me, an opportunity for its defence. This strikes me (having watched pretty much every Law & Order episode two or three times) as exactly the reason that in courts of law, arguments may only be presented to a judge with both sides present.
Might we translate these sorts of arrangements to design criticism?
Currently, in most of the courses I’ve taught, tutors are judge, jury, prosecutor and counsel for the defence – all at the same time. Perhaps it would be overdoing it a bit to hand gavels to design professors, but at the very least we might say students should always have an opportunity to rebut the arguments used in grading them before that grade is definite. And when we sit down with that cup of coffee in our role of judge or jury, we could try to deem any new ‘evidence’ we might come up with as inadmissible. We could try, as much as possible, to judge what was actually presented and to do the bulk of our ‘prosecuting’ in public, in the open court of the studio – where students can represent their work as ‘council for the defence’.