history of the PD program
Today in class David gave us a brief history of the program. I took notes so I could share it with y'all:
It all started in 1958. John Arnold was an ME professor at MIT (practicer, not researcher). He had an interesting approach to ME, that was a bit user-centered before the term existed. Legend has it that one of his things was to have his students pretend that they were designing for a world that was completely under water. This resulted in the kids spending a lot of time at the bottom of the pool at MIT, testing things out...
Anyway, Stanford managed to hire him away from MIT, without really realizing what they were getting themselves into. They then hired Bob McKim (author of
Experiences in Visual Thinking), an industrial designer rebelling against the “styling illness” he saw as common in his field. He wanted a more Bauhaus approach that combined form and function. He decided to make it a joint program with Art, and roped Matt Kahn into the rogue program. (According to David, it's really just a joint program with Matt...)
And the programs been about the same since then. As I mentioned before, there is movement in the university to evolve it, and it seems to be going in the direction of adding business to the mix. David drew the ubiquitous Sapient-IA Venn diagram showing the intersection of technology, business, and (in David's terms) human values. Supposedly this is the last year the program will be referred to as Product Design, too, since it really encompasses designing much more than products (also environments, experiences, processes, etc).
Oh, a random tidbit:
Apparently John Arnold one day just instructed his secretary to answer his phone "Design Division", and the ME Design Division was born. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rule following around here...
