thinkfetti

Mat Callahan’s 2005 book The Trouble With Music focuses on the way the “music industry” affects the creation and reception of music. The book is not genre-specific, but covers many musics, from folk to hip-hop to classical. He quotes from an interview in The Independent with Martin Engstroem, who in 2003 was the chief “talent scout” for Deutsche Gramophone, one of the very few major labels when it comes to classical music:

“‘Our releases are primarily linked to the artist, the star. People go to a concert, fall in love with the artist and buy their record. Yes, it’s a big change, but it’s one we have to live with. Ten years ago, you went purely for quality.’ But not now? ‘Of course, you still go for that, because we’re still talking DG. But quality is no longer enough on its own. You have to listen to the market. We’ve recently signed a lot of charismatic young artists like Lang Lang and Hilary Hahn, because we feel that’s where the energy lies.’ He agreed this runs counter to the old assumption that age and wisdom make the best music. ‘But that is not what the public says. To keep our figures in the black, we have to listen to the market.’” - quoted in Callahan, pp. 177-8.

Darwinian fitness (in the context of survivability in a market) does not equal quality…

Sometimes, it seems I should collapse under the weight of all the hats I wear. Luckily, not all of the hats are massive…

But as a department chairman, a middleman between administrative interests and faculty needs (both real and very really perceived), there’s some weight there. In a humanities department, there is one advantage over other departments: humanities faculty know at some level that it’s silly to claim objectivity. This understanding is so much a part of contemporary academic humanities culture that claiming to be “objective” is like painting your head red: people will just assume something’s amiss.

So our faculty members each individually claim to be acting in the best interests of the department (see my [last post->http://www.thinkfetti.com/archives/11] about voting), but when the votes are examined, it becomes clear to an observer that no one is acting objectively. In the current department situation, there are several faculty members who want the next departmental hire to be in their own discipline. Given the workloads and individuals’ desires to improve their lots, that’s hardly surprising. What is more interesting is how far faculty members go to convince others — and themselves — that they only have the best interests of the department at heart. And they succeed, part-way.

I’m in an interesting spot as chairman, because I too am thinking I’m being relatively “objective,” although I know I must be just ignoring some of my subjectivity. But my discipline, music, is not one that particularly stands to gain from any hire. My subjectivity is probably diminished in that area. In a Chinese philosophical interpretation (read Taoist), I’m happier because I don’t stand to gain. I’m more valuable because I’m less important.

Now, I’m certainly not claiming perfect objectivity - my wife teaches in the same department. But I’m not trying to sneak some result through because it would be beneficial to her, either. So let’s just face it: the goal shouldn’t be to work towards some impossible “objectivity.” It makes more sense for me, someone who happens to be the chairman at this particular point, to just try to do what I think is best. To do that, I owe everyone in the department my efforts and my thoughtfulness, not just my instincts (as I wrote [earlier->http://www.thinkfetti.com/archives/8], thoughtfulness is a necessary element of ethical action). I’m willing to offer that, and that’s exactly what I’m giving.

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.

There are some things that are worth putting a lot of time and effort into. Design is one. Now, it’s not possible to focus on everything worthy of design all at once - there’s just too much. For example, I seem to have spent the last three hours tweaking, fiddling, replacing… all just working to put the right image on to the top of this website. Thank you to [Andrew Davidhazy->http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/] for allowing me to use one of his outstanding splash images on this site. All of the things I have not (yet?) focussed on, such as fonts, widgets, even good copy - maybe they benefit slightly by having something designed nearby.

I’m interested in thinking about the places design can operate. For example, I work alongside engineers at my university, and one of them recently remarked in a meeting that he thinks engineers should devote more time to studying ethics. In his design labs, he instructs the students to consider ethics as a design constraint. I would go further - to my way of thinking, ethics is a design problem. Questions that don’t have pat answers include: “What to do?” “Why?” “Why do I find this particular ‘why’ reason appropriate in this context?” In other words, an ethical person isn’t someone who somehow just “knows the right thing to do.” Rather, a person acts ethically when he or she takes the time that’s available to evaluate alternatives and unearth the assumptions that point toward possible choices.

With this view, it seems insufficient to me for students to study and discuss “case studies,” narratives that usually describe projects that went very poorly. Case studies are good for people who study ethics, but to learn how to act ethically, students need to think about designing their decisions.