Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2020

This article explores the tools and processes of effective learning in the design studio with a special emphasis on the pedagogic roles of the tutors and the students in desk critique and peer critique. It aims to identify the ways that pedagogical roles of the tutor and the student change due to the nature of their communication and the degree of their engagement in learning processes. The inquiry is based on the findings of a qualitative case study involving tutors, students and graduates from a bachelor of architecture degree programme. Data were gathered via focus group and in-depth interviews, studio observations and analysed through qualitative content analysis. The findings indicated that the pedagogic identity of a tutor could help scaffold the formation of a community of learners in the design studio. However, the lack of negotiation and trust between a tutor and students in the feedback processes weakens the students’ effective learning experiences.

Given global population ageing, there is a pressing need to train students of design using methods that convey the impact of age-related vision impairments on the everyday function of older adults. Design students participated in an experiential study wearing goggles that simulated the prevalent markers of senescence and eye diseases, then completed everyday tasks such as walking down a hall and negotiating visual information. Results reflected the difficulty in detecting objects and signage as experienced by individuals who have visual problems. Students strongly agreed that the simulation experience was valuable and reflective comments on the experience provided insights regarding the perceived difficulty of walking as well as a heightened empathy towards those experiencing age-related eye problems. This study revealed that learning about visual senescence through lectures or cognitive emphasis curriculum could be strengthened by incorporating simulation as a teaching strategy to sensitize design students to the needs of older adults.

Design’s scope of practice has grown from one that was traditionally defined by materials and processes to one where designers are working on some of the most pressing challenges of our times. Once a reactive, artefact-based practice (e.g. poster, typeface, chair, etc.), design is now being situated as a proactive, social and participatory practice focused on outcomes as much as artefacts. Historically, as an academic subject, professional practice and research area, design has suffered from a lack of formal, established research frameworks and theoretical practices. By drawing on established literature, this article makes the case for the use of methods and practices developed in Participatory Action Research (PAR) to inform and enrich design practice, research and particularly education. The article identifies three shared areas between PAR and design that offer an opportunity for further interrogation; these are: a central concern of working with people; the use of iteration and reflection; and the measuring of success through change.

Cognitive psychologists have identified that introducing manageable challenges into the learning environment, coined as ‘desirable difficulties’ by Robert Bjork, helps students retain knowledge more deeply over time. Handling small, workable obstacles in the learning process slows down the learner and can have positive effects on retention and application. The more effort learners must apply to retrieve knowledge for a concept or skill, the more this process of retrieval enriches learning. While there is established literature on desirable difficulty in the field of cognitive psychology, the theory has not been applied to design education. The characteristics of the signature pedagogy of design naturally contain many of the key markers of desirable difficulty that drive learning retention. This article summarizes the major scholarship around the concept of desirable difficulty and explores applications for the teaching and learning of design, specifically around the signature pedagogy elements of critique, the design process and project-based learning.

Developing the creativity of design students is widely considered to be an important goal in design education. Finding effective training and instruction to improve creativity is a challenging subject for design educators and researchers. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of relational thinking training on creativity of design ideas in an analogical design task. The proposed training consisted of three steps: finding relations between two sources; the characteristics of each source; and relations between a new idea and the sources. The participants were 45 second-year architectural design students. The results indicated that the training significantly improved the quality of design ideas and significantly changed the type of similarity that designers established between source and design idea from literal similarity to analogical similarity. We concluded that stimulating relational thinking of design students by an educational training is an effective way in design education to improve the design creativity.

Risk is not a neutral term even in (western) contexts of art and design pedagogic practice, where risk-taking is entwined into the matrices of the academy from the macro to the micro: from institution to studio to tutor to student. Neither design education nor practice exist in a vacuum, so the conditions and contingencies of risk in contemporary design pedagogy are unpicked, in relation to place, process and people, as inter-connected (though often fragmented) components of study. Art school is examined as a transformative locus for risk: a conceptual-architectural site for knowledge but also a temporal space of subversion, within which the studio provides students with a relatively safe setting for risk in individual and collective formulations. Neo-liberal policies of standardization and competition are as embedded in educational institutions as they are across all levels of society: the resultant loss of agency is felt individually and collectively. This article reframes risk as fundamentally located and dialogic, an autonomous cooperative and collective action, underpinned by critical thinking and disobedient pedagogies. This is a transformative educational process anticipating change in an expanded mode of design in which the student members of the Alternative Art School are considered as critical agents, employing creative reflexivity as an antidote to the neo-liberal stifling of risk.