Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012

Design is a discipline of innovation: its essence is the creation of something new and unique. An assumption has been that the inclination and ability of a person to respond in novel and useful ways is largely inherited. Present research refutes this view, and it is now believed by many that, however creativity is defined, it is a form of behaviour that can be taught. Acknowledging this point leads to the questioning of how creativity is situated in the design curriculum. If, as present research suggests, most creativity training programmes are successful in that they encourage the development of metacognitive abilities, then the study of creativity as a self-regulatory metacognitive process is timely and important to design education.

This article takes a snapshot view of interdisciplinary design curricula through an examination of the multicultural, design postgraduate portfolio in one multidisciplinary university in the United Kingdom. It looks at how we are equipping our future designers/teachers to experience interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary professional practice. Many design courses, especially at postgraduate level, now consist of shared studio-based modules across a range of disciplines. For some, this may have been influenced by small student numbers in individual courses and an expediency of resources, but for many this has been a philosophical move to equip students for the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary world they are inhabiting. This small case study looks at a cohort of postgraduate students who through their MA course are undertaking and sharing interdisciplinary studio modules, with other design MA students alongside a multidisciplinary PG certificate in Learning & Teaching in Higher Education. The study highlights the synergies and tensions between professional practice and design pedagogy through the experiences of a student group made up of professional designers who are already working in multidisciplinary professional fields. It records, through questionnaires and interviews, their experience of projects where they are balancing the roles of professional designer/ teacher/student. It examines the multidisciplinary nature of the curriculum and asks students to comment on their experience of working in an interdisciplinary environment and to articulate how/whether their experience on the course has influenced their approach to both their pedagogic studies and outside professional practice.

Whilst some of the literature on design pedagogy reports on teaching through metaphor, little research is available that takes a linguistic perspective with a unique focus on the critique. This article reports on one study that examined metaphor as a connection between language and thought in the context of the end-of-project critique in the discipline of graphic design. It identifies the critical role of systematic metaphor in the discourse and shows how this use of metaphor contributes significantly to constructing an underlying coherence across topics, to the construction of knowledge and to the transmission of the shared values of the culture of the disciplines. Theory on metaphor from a cognitive perspective took into account the most recent applications of established metaphor research, involving complementary analyses of metaphor and generic intent. Investigation of the data was carried out on spoken texts, transcribed, of educators in graphic design. The analysis found what metaphors – from a cognitive perspective – are present in the educators’ discourse, realized through their instances. The results show the ways in which metaphors are instrumental to the knowledge being constructed in the discourse; and the ways in which the metaphors express values, functioning to construct a culture of shared concerns. The findings of this study have implications for the teachers of design in that they can be used in passing on to students the knowledge that this field has its own cultural values embedded within the language it uses. The findings will also be useful for teachers whose students are non-native speakers of English, to help bridge gaps in their understanding of communicative intent.

This article serves two purposes. First, it explains a review and development process for revising the application of assessment criteria for undergraduate art and design students in the United Kingdom. Second, it makes data generated by the process available for use by others. These data consist of keywords used to locate student learning across the numerical scale of marking typically employed in higher education art and design assessment procedures, and six different ways that this numerical scale has been used. Additionally, student participation in the development process is explained. Discussion about the process acknowledges the emergence of learning, meaning and identity in a social theory of learning, and the importance of assessment literacy in the development of pedagogical intelligence. The article will be of interest to those concerned with the development of assessment criteria in art and design, and how this might be improved through consistent use and formatting of criteria for use in formative and summative feedback mechanisms.

One major dilemma that appears not to help art and design students in their studio work is the assessment of creative outputs. Key issues inherent to assessment are who is carrying out the assessment and with what measure, especially when learners do not contribute to the assessment processes. This study sampled 247 tertiary students (104 male and 143 female) for their perceptions of assessment of their creative project-based learning in the Department of Communication Design, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Data were sourced using a self-administered questionnaire. Four themes emerged from the participants’ responses during data analysis: (1) perceptions on importance of creativity in graphic design, (2) relevance of creative process in creative production, (3) assessment and (4) assessment practice. Descriptive analysis was used to evaluate students’ perceptions of creativity and its assessment, and to further investigate how their perceptions might affect their attitudes towards the creative process. Results indicated that students overwhelmingly appreciated the concept of creativity, and suggest that teachers wishing to improve students’ attitudes towards the creative process and assessment of their creative projects, in general, should involve students in defining the learning outcomes and assessment criteria and involve them in the process. This study provides a pioneering work on how students perceive the assessment of their creative projects, and opens the way for further assessment studies involving both instructors and students. The findings have implications for instructors of communication design and school administrators, particularly those in tertiary education.

Typically, risk is a difficult idea to communicate to undergraduates as it requires a conceptual engagement with a project’s process. Without the experience of several project iterations it is difficult for students to see the value such a tool can bring to their work. The article will look at the use of ‘risk’ in relation to promoting deeper reflection and critical enquiry by student groups engaged in media practice project work. It will offer a model for best practice that has emerged from the author’s own action research into the topic and present for discussion a range of emergent insights.

RESEARCH METHODS IN EDUCATION, 7TH ED., LOUIS COHEN, LAWRENCE MANION AND KEITH MORRISON WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY RICHARD BELL , STEWART MARTIN, GARY MCCULLOCH AND CARMEL O’ SULLIVAN (2011) Abingdon: Routledge, 758 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-58336-7, paperback, £28.99

EDUCATION, FELICITY ALLEN (2011) London/Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-85488-192-5/ISBN 978-0-262-51636-5, paperback, £14.95