Almost Risking It All: Non-calculable Risk-taking and Design Education

This paper provides an argument against seeing risk-taking in higher design educations as something which ideally needs to calculable and formalised. Using Beck’s theory on risk-taking combined with the current discourse on design thinking, together with an analysis of a Danish three week-long interdisciplinary design workshop, we discuss risk-taking in design education as a much-needed element of education itself. Our contribution is providing an argument against seeing risk-taking in higher educations as something which ideally needs to calculable and formalised. We discuss and show how non-calculable risks, such as human-centred design concerns regarding e.g. desirability of use, ethics of technology etc are an equally important part of a modern-day skills set of higher educations, while still a challenge to balance when being assessed academically alongside the more formal skills. In the end, we argue design-based education models, emphasising interdisciplinary crossover with other non-designerly academic programmes as a way to both ensure programme specific reflections, and applying design thinking as a way of embracing the non-calculable elements of a problem space.