I’ll introduce my paper by an exercise that I force my students to do when they work on a project, I ask them to answer five questions that together describes the point of their project and that amount to what is generally described as critical thinking. After providing you with an idea of where I might be heading I will allow myself to ramble a little more.

What is the problem – there too many sofa tables produced by design students.

Why is it a problem – it underwrites an idea that design is primarily concerned with the production of consumer products for the upper middle class. It also illustrates a distance from the social context within which the students operate and underwrites a number of social, cultural and political structures.

To whom is it a problem – to designers, design students (it severally limits their capacity to do innovative work and limits the number of prospective users) and to society in terms of lost capacity. However, it is primarily a problem to us who are teaching the students.  Thus it is a question about how we teach “design”!

What have people said about it before – generally problems articulated in the field of design is per se different from problems in other disciplines. The importance of “design thinking” etc.

What is my addition to this debate – we have to understand and embrace the fact that design as a discipline is multidisciplinary in and of itself and that is a fact that has to be reflected both in the experience of our faculty and how any department of design builds collaborations with the university.