Kahn on Enriching Design

Andreas, a friend and student at Stanford University’s Graduate Design Program, relayed this to a couple of us yesterday: Some Project Guidelines and Thoughts about the Program [PDF]. It’s a five-page outline by Matt Kahn, a professor of art for nearly 60 years at the school, and has some advice on how students can approach their thesis subject.
It’s nice to read something from Kahn, who my friend rates so highly, that is in line with what I already hope to get out of my design undergrad at the Emily Carr Institute. Kahn outlines four key questions to ask yourself about your thesis, and by my extension and paraphrasing, your education and even career:

1. Is it design education and not just trade school training?
2. Is there idealism and not just pragmatics?
3. Is the content more important than the technology and tools?
4. Is it more than just novelty?

I’m writing those down as just another reminder to myself. This stuff isn’t ground breaking or anything, but what stuck with me next was that he says design doesn’t just have to “right wrongs.”
It seems every design method and trend I encounter both in and out of school these days is on a need-finding mission. I’ve certainly been an excited adopter of how Lorenzo Imbesi [flickr.com] (who in turn developed this with (took this from?) IDEO) taught us to approach design last year, by looking for needs without an object and/or meeting needs with existing ones [jeffwerner.ca]. It’s truly permeated the way I approach design and even everyday events.
But now Kahn is saying that finding a ‘need’ isn’t limited to a “problem or deficiency…but rather that design is equally valid when it builds upon positive conditions—taking advantage of inspiring opportunity with or without the attending ‘problem.’”
I like that. I was never much of a positive person until a few years ago. I like the idea of building on something positive out there. Kahn says there is an “overall human need for enrichment which often goes unidentified.” Now there’s some opportunities!
I’m (still) reading Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, which theorizes that irritation is the mother of invention (near the beginning of the book he actually says “Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention,” i.e. it is what we want from an object, not just what we need from it, that really drives its evolution.
Kahn says such design goals, which I’d say we’re predominantly taught (but not wholly) in ECI’s design program, are totally valid. But he continues, much to my new eyes: a design education can be like a moving work of art, where the need for human enrichment and an artist’s solution come together. Where—and here Kahn quotes early 20th C. sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, “Invention is the mother of necessity.”
Ha! So now I’ve got two variations on that famous quote (which a quick Google tells me can be attributed all the way back to Plato). Though seemingly contradictory, I wonder if there are elements in both (indeed, all three) proclamations that are agreeable. At least, I find something agreeable about both quotes. In many ways they make the whole design process appear so simple. In other ways they tell me, though I already have some vague notions and gut feelings about my future in design, that I haven’t even begun to see or articulate the areas of design I could pursue.