Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2013

This article explores the potentially fruitful relationships between design education and rhetorical education. Teachers of rhetoric and teachers of design have much to learn from one another, yet they rarely interact. One way in which design and rhetoric should be informing one another is through the related concepts of branding, familiar to designers, and ethos, well known to rhetoricians. Branding is often important in design curricula; students learn to design products whose voice people are willing to bring into their lives. And branding has obvious connections to rhetorical ethos; Aritstotle’s tripartite concept of ethos can be used to deepen discussions of both ethos and branding, particularly focusing on the ethical dimensions of both. This article surveys literature on rhetorical ethos, presents practical classroom strategies for teaching ethos and describes the possible productive relationship between teaching rhetorical ethos alongside branding.

The authors provide a scholarly definition for metaphor-rich, story-driven ‘narrative visualization’. They argue that metaphors create a rich and emotionally resonant set of associations that frame the narrative and effectively support ‘System 1’ (or intuition-based) thinking and decision-making that Daniel Kahneman and others have identified as the primary drivers of financial behaviour. The authors then apply these observations to a case study in which they analyse student work on a financial literacy design project. They discuss best practices for teaching narrative visualization and argue for its relevance in a contemporary design education – especially its capacity to represent and reflectively explore complex financial and other concepts.

Enthusiasm is growing in non-traditional environments for teaching design by adapting knowledge and approaches from studio pedagogy, described as a ‘signature pedagogy’ by Lee S. Shulman in 2005. Meanwhile, those in fields where some variation of studio pedagogy have been used for decades are engaged in addressing some of its experienced shortcomings. Within this landscape of change, the authors have been engaged in study of their own studio-based courses, (interior design, instructional design, and interaction/experience design), reflecting on how this form of pedagogy is contributing to students’ development as designers. In this study we consider the role of the instructor in the studio using a lens informed by narrative aesthetics and transformative education. The narrative that an instructor encourages students to experience with regard to themselves, to the instructor, or to both, has a profound impact in the studio environment. This article will explore that impact within the context of the authors’ own courses via review of course notes and collaborative reflection with colleagues.

Critique is a central feature of design education, serving as both a structural mechanism to provide regular feedback, and as a high stakes assessment tool. However, this study addresses informal peer critique as an extension of this existing form, engaging students in communication outside of the formal pedagogy. The purpose of this study is to gain a greater understanding of the role of informal critique in externalizing design thinking and judgment, as analysed through Bourdieu’s habitus. Structures surrounding critique, including the role of informal vs formal spaces, objectivity vs subjectivity of critique, and differences between professor and peer feedback are addressed. Beliefs about critique are analysed as critical elements of an evolving habitus, supported by or developed in response to the culture inscribed by the formal pedagogy. Informal critique reveals tacit design thinking and conceptions of design, and outlines the co-construction of habitus between students and the formal pedagogy.

While design researchers use diverse approaches to study designing, non-designers face specific impediments in adopting these research approaches in their quest to gain design knowledge. Recognizing such challenges, this article outlines how an education academic engineered a first-person methodology to investigate the nature of designing. Through undertaking a learner-researcher study in an undergraduate architectural design basics subject, learning about design through learning to design, she tracked her developing design ideas and crystallized a view of architectural designing as a three-phase heuristic for value selection: imagining possibilities, interpreting ideas to form architectural principles and distilling quality. This article concludes by speculating on various research directions arising from this learner-researcher methodology and a view of designing as value selection and, in particular, provoking consideration of how similar developmental data might be collected and analysed for explanatory insights in diverse design and educational contexts.

To teach design effectively, foundational design thinking needs to be understood. Treating the design process as a mysterious mental talent provides little scope for teaching the subject. This study explores the origin of designs and how experience impacts the sophistication of design ideas across educational domains. Secondary and tertiary students were given a common architectural brief and students’ outcomes were compared and contrasted to seek commonalities or differences in their approaches to solving design problems. In addition, interviews were conducted with participants and a panel of design experts to further explore the students’ design practices. The results provide an insight into design cognition from multiple viewpoints. We suggest that designs come from various forms of copying; metaphors, analogies and icons are used as preconceptions by which a design problem is understood. Moreover, experience had a direct link to expertise, which is evident across educational domains.

The study of creativity in design has tended to emphasize its value and location in the individual designer as part of a statistically outlying population rather than as a normal characteristic of an entire population. Theories of creativity have generally stressed either its mysterious, gift-like qualities to an individual or as a constructed relationship between consumer and designer. This article, in developing a third view of creativity in design as a ‘normal’ phenomenon, describes a study of 1038 student design assignments obtained from a distance-learning course in Design Thinking. The article shows how normal distributions of design outputs can result from a large population following a structured design process. We argue that the creativity displayed is a natural result of the ‘grammar’ of that process. Seen in this way creativity becomes less of an individual ‘gift’ to a select minority, as generally understood, but an everyday occurrence to problems of design.