Photo © 2010 California College of the Arts.

“Surprisingly, there is not yet a consistent source for talent in this field. CCA, with its interdisciplinary environment, impressive facilities, and great location at the hub of the digital world, is the ideal place to build a world-class interaction design program,” commented Dr. Kristian Simsarian.

The 3-year program is still being devised but the intent is to prepare students to create meaningful and innovative designed experiences in the realms of work, lifestyle, and play—from computers and mobile devices to interactive physical spaces, games, and social networks. Students will develop technical and strategic skills which will be applicable to numerous industries, from business to entertainment, education, and health.

As Provost Mark Breitenberg put it: “CCA’s core institutional values of community engagement, innovation, and sustainability will infuse this new program and produce highly trained, socially aware designers with tremendous capacity for creativity, [...] we’re looking for talented students who want to change the world.”

The program will be grounded in the Bay Area, in the Silicon Valley. As such it’s a unique proposition not only to prospective students (and parents) but also to the Bay Area Interaction Design community and companies. First, the students will be able to take part in exchanges and conversations with companies and practitioners at the forefront of the discipline through sponsored studios and projects, internship opportunities, and casual events. Second, it is a great opportunity for both CCA and Bay Area Interaction Design community to establish the campus as a hub and a Home for the discipline. CCA impressive facilities could host lectures, workshops, events, conferences, you name it… The IxD community should rise to the occasion to ensure this program becomes one of the best in the world. Lastly, companies will finally have access to a steady pool of world-class talent that has been educated, coached, and mentored in the spirit of what makes the Bay Area unique.

Finally this program, along with similar ones starting around the globe, could be a real turning point for the discipline. Potentially they could educate a new breed of designers that would then go on to a Graduate program outside the field of Art & Design demonstrating how design processes can positively impact political institutions, legislative bodies, healthcare, the Education, the Economy, etc. Undeniably multidisciplinary designers will thrust design and the world forward. This prospect is very very exciting!

For more information about CCA’s Interaction Design Program, visit www.cca.edu/interaction.

Last week, I have attended the 50th anniversary of the Creation Industrielle departement of Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Appliques et Metiers d’ Art in Paris – the first design school I have studied back in the last century. Sadly, everything is still in the last century from education to facilities to organization. For those of you that are not familiar with the French education system, it is free. And that’s the problem. How can you compete in an international market with no budget?

The students are smart and they have potential but they are being ripped off.
They are being ripped off by a mafia of teachers that have been there forever and are totally out of touch of today’s needs and skills;
They are being ripped off by the French Education ministry, which is not enabling its most valuable resources to be competitive in a global market;
They are being ripped off by the French design industry (if that exists) for not pressuring design schools to change their curriculum to meet today’s needs.

French design education needs to change from a “star designer” mindset and craft skills training to a multi-diciplinary user-centered design process and entrepreneurship/leadership mindset.

Back to the event. Note to the organizer. When you gather 500 alumini that have graduated from 1956 to today, the least you can do to give people name tags to facilitate discussions. Isn’t the point of such event to get people to “meet” and do business together? Obviously it was not. Instead, they decided to give us a 1-hour lecture on French design! FFS. Luckily Anne Asensio (Director of Advanced Design at GM) gave a rather inspiring concluding 15 minutes talk, which was really difficult to hear due to the poor acoustic of the hall…

Concluding thoughts? After attending several events at UIAH in Helsinki and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, I can’t help thinking that French design education and schools are obsolete.

Earlier this month, I went to a KCRW concert at the California Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles. For those that are not familiar with the place, it’s just a plaza with a fountain and a few shops. Anyway, I noticed that half of the space, and all of the VIP, was covered with chairs. Why is that? It is an ad-hoc music performance; people should be able to dance? No? Then I realised that most of our infrastructure is designed, consciously or not, to inhibit people to express themselves with their body. Think about for a second. Chairs should be there to allow people to rest, not to prohibit them to dance. Thankfully, people’s primitive instincts take over after some time, one stands up and starts dancing while the others are like @%#^$@^, but then 2, 3, 4, 10, etc follow. When enough people are dancing, they start to rearrange the space by pushing the chairs around. We have all witness this. We all know this.

This one obvious example and I am sure they are many others, but it made me realised how far my/our education reaches. What would the world look like if the Arts were the primary focus of education?