On March 11, 2021, the School of Art successfully held the teaching salon entitled “T-shaped Design Education Oriented Towards Industry and Future”. Professor Hao Ninghui, PhD Supervisor and Deputy Dean of the School of Urban Design, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, presided over the Salon and delivered a keynote speech. Jiangsu University School of Art Dean Han Rong, Deputy Dean Zhang Kai and faculty members and students of the School of Art attended the Salon.
Starting with the core concept of his lecture, Professor Hao Ninghui pointed out the market demand for “T-type design education” and the urgency of design education reform for colleges and universities. Professor Hao continued, “T-shape design” mainly refers to the designer’s profound professional knowledge of design and his or her wide knowledge of other disciplines. In today’s society, the information is rapidly updating so that designers not only need to delve into the professional field of their, but also need to acquire the knowledge in related fields, such as the knowledge of computer science, business insight, and project management.
Professor Hao revealed the significance of “T-type design” by establishing the following formula: “good design = good business”. Nowadays, it is difficult for designers with profound knowledge of their own subject to adapt to the diversified market demand, for their own design may not turn “good business”. Taking art city, creative city and cultural city as examples, Professor Hao pointed out that the single path of relying on the urban planning knowledge is unsuitable for the current urban development, but we need to consider the interdisciplinary integration and symbiosis of art, creativity and culture to turn our city into a warm-hearted entity for its residents.
When talking about design education in colleges and universities, Professor Hao pointed out that contemporary students are both consumers of and participants in education. With the rise of new media, the channels for students to acquire knowledge are being increasingly specialized and diversified, which poses a great challenge to teaching content and level of the college faculty. The future educators need to balance the symbiotic relationship between the faculty and students, take the bold to cultivate students’ sense of trial and error, and encourage the joint entrepreneurship of the faculty and students.
Toward the end of the salon, Professor Hao put forward the idea of lifelong learning. Practitioners in the design industry often forgot about the power of innovation while engaging in mechanized work only. He mentioned that although they have professional design departments, quite a few large corporations in China still need to buy design plans from colleges and universities, for the college faculty are always studying the most cutting-edge design knowledge while the corporate employees more often than not just pay attention to the manufacture of products but ignore the learning of the state-of-the-art design knowledge. Therefore, as a design researcher must cultivate the concept of lifelong learning so as to ensure that his or her design thinking might keep pace with the frontier ideas of the times and avoid the tragedy of being tided out by the times.
The teaching salon concluded with warm applause from both the faculty and students. Deputy Dean Zhang Kai made a summary of Professor Hao’s wonderful lecture. The faculty participants said that Professor Hao’s lecture enjoys a high vantage point and a broad vision, which has a great inspiration for the teaching work of the design major. As a national first-class undergraduate major, the faculty of Product Design will fully absorb the cutting-edge teaching ideas and practice, strive to cultivate excellent design talents in line with the future social development, and make contribution to the development and progress of design discipline. The student participants said that in their future scientific research and learning they will strive to fill the gaps and build themselves into a socially recognized “T-type design talent”!
