Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2018

How are museum collections used as a source of inspiration by creative practitioners? This article describes a project, Inspiration Examined, funded by Share Academy, which used a narrative research method to critically examine the process of inspiration using interviews with students carried out at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA). Share Academy was a partnership project between University College London (UCL), University of the Arts London (UAL) and the London Museums Group, with the aim of exploring the potential for more effective and mutually beneficial collaborations between Higher education and specialist London museums. See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/research/share-academy/index

This paper suggests that strong beliefs about the recommendation of academic writing for practitioners in the Coldstream Reports remain in teaching and management positions across the current Higher Education (HE) sector. However, an intensive re-reading of the reports establishes these beliefs are unfounded. This article posits that upholding these institutional assumptions may have an impact on how writing is used as a component of examination and therefore aligned with the need for academic parity across the HE sector, rather than as a tool for understanding and articulating practice. As a result, this article calls for the reinstatement of a unified HE art and design curriculum to be filled with a diversity of pedagogical approaches, including writing practices, that are complementary to and inform the purposes of creative practice.

This longitudinal study is based on the reflective writing activities of students on the Basic Design I course in the Department of Industrial Product Design at Istanbul Technical University (ITU). Besides the cognitive, metacognitive and affective influence of reflective writing on design learning, this study is an attempt to seek answers to how design students respond to reflective writing in design curricula. The structure and content of the reflective writing in this study was inspired by writing-to-learn approaches. We analysed and discussed students’ remarks under common issues, and exemplified diary entries that are related to the act of writing. Based on the findings, the functions of reflective writing in the design studio were specified.

This article describes and evaluates an inquiry into the meaning and value of sketchbooks for students and faculty on an MFA programme in Visual Communication at a major Thai university. Methodologically, the inquiry rests upon an extended period of participant observation by the author. This was informed by a phenomenological approach to the apprehension of subjective and intersubjective experience. Conversational data from studio discussions was synthesized with a large body of example sketchbook pages and writings produced by the participants. This material served as the basis for theory production influenced by grounded theory. The outcome of the inquiry is a re-conceptualization of the sketchbook in terms of the various encounters that it affords and the roles that these might play in the development of creative practice.

This article presents a multi-method case study of five mobile device and desktop computer applications intended specifically for craft-design. The main aim of the study was to investigate the effects of application usage on the craft-design process and to analyse the usability of the applications from three perspectives: user experience, traditional usability and functionality. Eight master’s level craft teacher students evaluated the applications and used those to conduct a design task on a Virtual Design Studio course at the University of Helsinki. To enable an authentic working environment and style for the participants and to gather research data remotely, a multi-method approach was designed that included data from questionnaires, written tasks and recordings of screen events. Analysis of the effects of application usage on the craft-design process revealed three factors that promote changes: the usability of an application, new possibilities and limitations compared to traditional design methods and the technical expertise of the designer – usability being the most significant factor behind the changes observed.

This article reports on a small-scale study undertaken at a leading UK arts university. The study aims to explore the increasing trend of ‘technicians’ transitioning their careers into ‘academia’. Studies that focus on technicians are scarce. Those few existing studies describe the growth of practiced-based teaching in the creative arts, the sector’s increasing reliance on technicians and technicians’ greater involvement in shaping the learning experiences of students. Conversely, there is a rich literature that describes the unbundling and devaluation of traditional academic roles. This article employs a phenomenographic methodology to explore the experiences of three members of staff who have recently transitioned from technician roles into academia, considering whether the factors that have elevated the status of technicians have also eroded traditional academic roles, and whether this enables individuals to transition between what many experience as disparate camps.

Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education – Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Susan Orr and Alison Shreeve (2018) Oxford: Routledge, 168 pages, ISBN 978-1-13821-941-0, h/bk, £105