Design managers, teaching “soft skills”, and ambiguity
From Mark Oakley’s Managing Product Design, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984:
“The role of the design manager is clearly a crucial one in promoting successful results. In many respects the qualities required in order to be effective in this job are substantially different from those traditionally exhibited by managers. The main emphasis must be on the design manager’s ability to deal with change and ambiguity.” (p. 56)
In teaching humanities in a science and engineering university, I have noticed that some engineering faculty find it odd that we humanities faculty members want to limit our class sizes. Teaching “soft skills” such as effective communication and tolerance of ambiguity, or skills that are elusive in both teaching and evaluation, such as critical thinking, requires (in my experience) much more time to be spent in evaluating and responding to student work. In teaching physics courses, I found evaluation of student performance to be more straightforward in most cases. There, I could maximize efficiency in grading and evaluating without sacrificing accuracy and helpfulness of response. Occasionally, I would incorporate error trends in assignment answers into my teaching; this feedback loop could help improve student performance, even in large classes. But where the “right” answer is not so well defined, and the process is being emphasized, there is simply more work to be done in evaluating student effort.
Ethics is not simply a trainable ability to select a “right” answer. Design is not simply choosing what is inevitable, profitable, or aesthetically appealing. Critical thinking is not simply a matter of following an algorithm. And because these activities are non-trivial, evaluating students as they develop their skills in them is time-consuming, and classes taught by a single professor probably cannot be scaled up in size without losing effectiveness.
Ambiguity provides opportunity (and risk), but to tolerate or embrace ambiguity requires time.