Donald Schon’s Philosophy of Design and Design Education

Donald A. Schon is among our generation’s most influential philosophers of design and design education, yet remains uncelebrated in both philosophy and design education. This paradox dissolves when we consider Schon’s specific contribution. He was, by his own account, a displaced philosopher working in (among other places) a management consulting firm, a governmental agency, a non-profit center for social development, and finally a university department of urban planning. He used his marginal position in the design professions to reframe professional practice generally. Schon spoke from philosophy and design to professional practice, conceiving design to be its unifying core. From his philosophy of design he projected a new model for teaching and learning in the professions, and a new conception of the research university. The former has been taken up and elaborated by educators in the professions – in schools of medicine, law, business, public administration, education, engineering, architecture, among others. The latter has entered the mainstream of discussion among higher education reformers. Philosophers and design educators have not paid the same measure of attention to Schon’s ideas. My purpose in this article is to re-introduce Schon as philosopher and design educator, to provide a simple exposition of his basic ideas – his conception of design, his notion that all professional practice is ‘designlike,’ his ideas about how design is taught and learned, and his conception of the university as a collection of schools of design.