By Susan Green
Design is the tangible result of creative problem solving. Good design makes our lives better. It makes opening a door easier, it makes being in a room pleasurable and it makes your house comfortable and more efficient.
As taught by Matthew Ziff and David Matthews, assistant professors of interior architecture, design is a demanding process that engages a range of human experiences. It begins with identifying needs and desires, thinking about and exploring the making of something, making it, using it, revising and replacing it and identifying new or changed needs and desires.
"In the making of things students are forced to engage the consequences of their thoughts," Ziff said. "They learn there are multiple answers to a problem rather than one answer, and that discovery leads to a complex process of reflection, transformation and evaluation."
Design education moves students toward independent thought, action and capability. To guide students in interior architecture toward original thought, Ziff and Matthews created a studio lab experience that they refer to as "pathfinding." It's based on the premise that a pathfinder is someone who marches forth into the unknown and carefully notes the small conditions that reveal which way to go.
"The design studio is an educational environment and a place for inquiry, learning, discovery and experimentation. It's a way of learning," Matthews said. "The studio is central to what students do. It leads them to learn how to figure things out."
Their teaching method is rooted in two things: student work is original thought, which challenges preconceptions and results in creating something that didn't exist, and professionalism, which brings to the creative process issues of ethics, law and manufacturing/construction processes.
Within the studios, students working individually or in teams are presented with "wicked problems," described by Horst Rittel, a design educator at UC-Berkeley, as ill-defined problems without clearly defined outcomes. Initially they're distressed, because for many students this is the first time they've been asked to apply critical and independent thinking to physically making something.
Ziff and Matthews said they don't tell students what they want their design proposal to be like, but their work has to respond to a set of requirements given to them. Student designers participate in critiques of their work along with faculty, "making things requires you to be self-critical in ways that other disciplines do not." The professors want students to recognize design as a valid process of pedagogy.
Although it's often not recognized, creativity and design are part of every discipline and in everything that surrounds us.
Think about that the next time you open a door and walk into a room.
Susan Green is a writer with University Communications and Marketing.
