Futures of Design Ed 39: Rethinking Interdisciplinary Design Education from Japan скачать в хорошем качестве

Futures of Design Ed 39: Rethinking Interdisciplinary Design Education from Japan

The team setting up the new College of Design at the University of Tokyo present two major themes and tensions they face. Establishing a new design school is a significant undertaking, but it also offers an opportunity to critically examine the foundations of design education. Given that contemporary design education is historically rooted in concepts, methods, and approaches predominantly developed in western contexts, establishing a new design school in Japan enables us to surface and interrogate underlying, often taken-for-granted assumptions. When an interdisciplinary layer is introduced, these questions are further intensified, as multiple epistemic traditions, pedagogical expectations, and disciplinary conventions intersect within the same learning environment. The focal point of this session is to explore selected tensions in design education that, we argue, are present across geographical and institutional settings but become particularly visible when establishing a new interdisciplinary design school outside dominant western traditions. Drawing on our ongoing work in developing the University of Tokyo College of Design, we focus on two interrelated domains of tension, temporal and relational, while acknowledging that these represent only a subset of the many tensions shaping interdisciplinary design education. The first tension is temporal. Interdisciplinary design education brings together fields that operate on fundamentally different timescales: AI and software development iterate in months, business and education reform in years, infrastructure and policy in decades, and climate or nuclear waste management in centuries to millennia. When different disciplines are brought together, they often have to navigate incompatible temporal imaginaries of what “the future” means and when design interventions should take effect. In this sense, how might interdisciplinary design curricula cultivate capacities to hold multiple temporalities simultaneously, resisting the pressure to collapse all design work into a single, accelerated timeline? The second tension focuses on relationality. Can academic excellence and social engagement co-exist in students’ learning journeys without being treated as separate or competing domains? In progressive design institutions, student agency is increasingly integrated into curriculum design, with students setting their own goals, exploring methods of their choice, and proceeding at their own pace. From a student's perspective, how might psychological ownership of learning reconcile the tension between individual development (self) and social responsibility (others) in interdisciplinary design education?