Symbol and Form
A New Vision of Design Education
(This is based on a week-long course I taught at the Danish Design School in the 90s.)
It is valuable, if not essential, to explore psychological, meditative and interactive feedback techniques of working. These are likely to be quite new to designers and students, but are common to psychotherapeutic work. These ways of seeing and experiencing our world bridge the gap between what happens within and what we create outside in our design work. We can correlate the way our body works with the way our designs evolve. Too often what we design has nothing to do with what is going on with us inside — yet when there is a link, and then later an intimate connection, the designed objects cease to be disposable, but rather carries meaning that encourages us and the owners or stewards of such objects to nurture them, to care for them and to pass them on as containers of our own personal being.

Symbolism is the language by which our collective cultural unconscious communicates deep experience to our conscious mind through dreams, active imagination, fantasy or guided imagery. When we discover this language, we realize that it is always with us and can be understood, whether outwardly or inwardly, by everyone around us. In the new design education we may explore a deeper and more profound world into which we invest our work and life.