From Trans-disciplinary to Undisciplined Design Learning: Educating through/to Disruption

This document testifies the attempt at critically interpreting certain formative models of the designer from an evolutionary point of view. The criteria used to draw up a historical mapping and perform a reading of some interesting contemporary case histories concern the comparison between the subjective approach (the unveiling of the author’s personality and different identity, considered as a subject under formation), on one hand, and the objective reproducibility of a process (project methodology), on the other. We have offset this line of interpretation with the relationship between the concept of trans-disciplinary (an encoded approach of transferring methods and instruments from other disciplines), and that of non-disciplinary or “undisciplined” (in the sense of transcending the disciplines and therefore looking for innovation “outside the rules”). This analysis comprises profiles resulted from specifically disciplinary educational traditions (artistic and polytechnic); however, a profile that is not formable within modern schools and which generates “out-of-context” designers also emerges. Lastly, a new profile is outlined that insists on learning rules and methodologies, but makes the disobedience of said rules and methods the margin of originality and distinction (which depends on the qualities of the designer and his/her subjective capacity and creativity). The underlying assumption is that, through a shift towards the objective (therefore methodologically transmissible and encodable) and non-disciplinary dimensions, it is possible to educate highly “disruptive” profiles, inducing a certain attitude in students to tackling the design project through a method which can continually challenge its rules into question, in order to innovate them. The essay ends with a list of some contemporary challenges of education processes that seem to interpret surrounding conditions of profession and research in the sector and that, as a result, have still to determine changes in the official education models.