Design Portfolios

Foreword

Most people have been told that the 3‐Rs of education are “reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic,” but Bruce Archer, the influential British design educator, quoted a family matriarch who said that the 3‐Rs were, “reading and writing, reckoning and figuring, and wroughting and wrighting.”¹ The first two pairs of words in this alternative view cover literacy and numeracy, both of which are emphasized in most primary and secondary schooling. The last pair, though, uses terms that can be unfamiliar. Wroughting concerns knowing how the things in our world are brought about or technology; wrighting concerns crafts of making and practices of designing. The notion that knowing how to make and design things is its own fundamental kind of understanding will be obvious to those who are completing any sort of design degree but may seem novel to others. After all, for whatever reasons, experiences in sustained formal coursework in design—or even a single semester‐long class—often occur only when a person enters college or even later when they enroll in a graduate program. More needs to be said on this important point, but before that, what does it mean to learn about and to learn how to design?

An inherent aspect of design practice is taking on what are called ill‐structured problems.² By contrast, an example of a very well‐structured problem is a jigsaw puzzle: At the start, a person has all the pieces, the intended configuration is provided on a box cover, and the pieces can fit ...