Abstract:

Rapid growth in design schools and their, often historic, dependence on part-time professional
designers for faculty have tended toward cultivating administrations structured to cope with the
present rather than to envisage and innovate for the future. The leadership in such schools is, often,
consumed by fire fighting and crisis management, on the one hand, or quality assurance and policy
compliance on the other, leaving less and less time for meaningfully defining and implementing a
schools’ academic mission and intellectual, social and cultural contribution. It was within this
landscape that we began to question whether design—as a propositional, inquisitive practice—could
be deployed to inform the way design schools are envisioned and led?
The practice of design being put forward here is one that incorporates a procedure for disclosing the
problematic in its complexity in order to deal with the technological, cultural and political issues
particular to a specific situation. If we are to be true to this contemporary proposition that designing
can operate as a meta-process, uniquely able to engage various disciplinary, managerial and
economic structures in complex, changing systems, then it is obvious that many design schools could
and should be in this sense ‘intelligently designed’.