By Gabrielle Kennedy /asdf 25-06-2010

Design.nl chats to Timo de Rijk, the newly appointed Premsela Professor of the Master’s Degree Programme -  Design Cultures, a specialization of the Master Comparative Arts and Media Studies. The Vrije University set up this course to stimulate research and education on the position and workings of design in society.

Design needs critical thinkers, which is the premise of this new masters programme starting in September.   The course is designed to enable students to develop in different directions, but in a way that fuses design history, design theory and general design discourse.  “By connecting all of that, the students will be better able to interpret what is happening in everyday material culture,” De Rijk says.

By that he means understanding what is happening in the world of contemporary design when looked alongside the wider social and political zeitgeist.  Design not as random shapes and objects, but as tools used to shape and clothe the world as it is now.   It’s a grand goal and one that will demand interdisciplinary research methods borrowed from anthropology, sociology and even politics.

By the end of the year-long course, students – and De Rijk hopes to have a “classroom full of them” - will have a better hold on the issues and theories that can nourish a more focused design debate.  “There are some critics and curators,” De Rijk says, “but the problem is that they all exist as individuals.”

In the future De Rijk sees informed opinion and trained minds not as incidental, but as a more expected and accepted part of the design industry.  The worlds of art and architecture, by fair comparison, have always enjoyed a proper theoretical and critical framework that have lent those disciplines broad credibility.  It’s exactly what design lacks.  “Debate in the world of architecture is much more profound than in design,” De Rijk says, “and this problem exists both on the side of the designers and also the critics.”

When asked about how any of this will assist designers and their methods De Rijk is quick to point out that although they should hugely profit form critical debate, his course isn’t about helping designers.  “Art critics don’t exist to help artists,” he says.  “They are there to understand the world.”

And De Rijk believes that this sort of theoretical approach can't be taught within or alongside design.  Current courses in existing design academies nurture a more personal perspective.  “In art and design school students connect more with their own ideas about a very specific topic,” De Rijk says.  “They are not being equipped with skills to understand the world.”

This month it was announced that the Design Academy Eindhoven will introduce a new theory course headed up by design critic Louise Schouwenberg.  “But I can't see how students in that sort of environment can really talk about design in a scientific way,” De Rijk says.  “The excellent work they are doing down there is much more personal.  I think a theory course is extremely interesting and important, but it will be a hell of a job to achieve that at the Design Academy.”

Timo de Rijk is a design historian connected to the Technical University in Delft.  He is a curator, teacher, and writer.

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