Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2017

Studio-based teaching is a central component of the curriculum in architecture where designs are discussed, critiqued and challenged in the assessment of students’ creative works. Drawing on Dannels’ genre framework and a holistic approach to assessment, this article presents an analysis of design studio discourse based on non-participant records of observations of design studio presentations/crits and audio recordings of student focus groups and interviews with design studio tutors. Aspects of design studio pedagogy explored are the studio as context of learning and the discourse of guidance and feedback. Findings reveal the tension between providing explicit guidance that may constrain the freedom required for creative works, the difficulty of providing transparent feedback and the centrality of the subjective in design assessment. The studio as context of learning remains a challenging forum, in which the subjective nature of design is openly negotiated in discourse based, to a considerable extent, on tacit discipline understandings.

This paper presents the outcomes of an action research inquiry that set out to enhance first-year visual communication student learning of design theory and history through the incorporation of creative practice methods commonly used in practical design studio environments. As educators of both design theory and practice, our previous observations of how novice design students engaged with theory, compared to how they engaged with practice, led us to the decision that change was required to facilitate deeper understanding of theoretical discourse through the incorporation of creative practice methods. That was our ‘call to action’. The methods, described in the article as interventions, were introduced to support the critical and analytical thinking necessary to engage with theoretical discourse. They can also be thought of as learning strategies incorporated to enhance student learning and involved creative thinking exercises, visualization techniques, collaboration and audience presentation. Our findings demonstrate that student learning of design theory and history can be enhanced when creative practice methods are employed within a critical studies context and that discourse in design education is no longer the exclusive domain of the written word.

The aim of this article is to show a sample of elicited linguistic responses in order to identify cognitive links between academic knowledge and professional practice in architecture. We also study the composition of the identified mappings. To this end, we have analysed and compared a survey conducted among Technical University of Madrid undergraduate architecture students on the one hand and a group of architects on the other. This study is part of a major research work carried out by the research group DISCYT. The surveys presented here propose the idea of working with cognitive mappings that display understanding of important competencies in architectural practice. As a theoretical framework, we draw on cognitive linguistics theory, particularly on conceptual and linguistic metaphor theory. Since text and images are often fused in the different stages of architectural work, we have added images in the survey so as to better determine conceptual correspondences in cognitive visual input (Forceville 2010; Kress 2010; Cuadrado et al. 2016; Roldán-Riejos 2016). The method consisted of examining and comparing the results obtained in the survey from the groups of students and architects in order to infer implications for educators.

This article reflects upon the experience of a New Zealand design lecturer, invited to facilitate workshops in student-centred learning with tertiary teachers, in China. The context was a new, themed-environment design degree, which sought to integrate international design and teaching methodologies. Developing a community of practice amongst the teaching staff was considered vital to the enhancing of subsequent student learning experiences. A decentred approach was used, in which all cultural conditionings were acknowledged and reflected upon while avoiding emphasis on any particular forms. Various types of feedback were used to gain teaching staff responses to the workshop experiences. The challenge was to present alternative design teaching models in another cultural and pedagogical environment, and to encourage forms of studio teaching practice that could lie alongside traditional ways.

This article explores the perceptions of a small sample of academic staff from a university in Spain and another in the United Kingdom towards changes in fine art higher education (HE) in both countries over the last 25 years. The authors sought to understand if, and how, the changing HE context had influenced the provision of fine art in each university, and considered it useful to address whether there was any comparability across the two institutions in terms of the responses to the broad changes in resourcing and quality assurance. They used a series of semi-structured interviews with eight respondents, four in each country, aimed at eliciting staff views. These perceptions were considered alongside available data on student numbers, enrolments, graduation and gender, in order to explore the reactions of teaching staff to shifts in context over the period. The study concludes that the stance of criticality adopted by many fine art academics, who value their academic freedom and autonomy and prioritize the practice of their discipline, is being challenged by many of the recent changes in HE. As a result, staff who are being asked to undertake a wider range of activities are having to adapt their view of the nature of fine art HE.

Art, craft and design activities are fundamentally creative in nature, requiring the implementation of ideas in the form of materially embodied artefacts. Within art and design education, initiation to the creative process is usually enhanced via a studio model where material experimentations are an integral part of learning processes. This case study explores materiality in learning from a relational perspective where material forces are at play in constituting learning: how learning is entangled with or an effect of the engagement with the materiality of places, environments and (organic) matter. We base our enquiry on an MA course called Design Exploration and Experimentation organized at Aalto University, Finland. The experiences of three students discussed in the article form the key data of the case study. By describing the relations between the experiences, environments and creative outcomes, the case study sheds light on the relevance of materiality in learning, especially in higher education.