Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2026

Animation captivates viewers with its visual storytelling, fostering creativity, delivering entertainment, and imparting knowledge. It influences culture, media and education, shaping our perception of the world. Animation films are popular for their engaging narratives, well-developed characters and cultural significance. Character design in animated films can embody a brand’s essence, transcend cultural boundaries and influence behavior. The rising prominence of animation in global media significantly impacts children’s learning and creativity. Japanese anime, in particular, has gained a strong foothold in various markets, including India, shaping the animation landscape. This study explores anime’s growing influence on character design among Indian animation students, assessing their character design process and awareness of Indian animation. Surveys and interviews with students, faculty and industry professionals reveal anime’s impact on students’ creative projects and the limited awareness of Indian animation. The study emphasizes the need for further research to understand anime’s influence on students’ artistic styles.

First COVID-19 then the war in Ukraine forced educational institutions to adapt to online and hybrid teaching methods in new realms. Despite the challenges presented by this, some educators have found innovative ways to teach in hybrid mode, such as using new technologies or creative teaching methods. This article shows the method used by Olha Tikhonova and Oresta Remeshylo-Rybchynska to engage students in difficult situations with different kinds of restrictions and challenges, both during the COVID-19 restrictions and then after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022. The method is rooted in Olha Tikhonova’s comprehensive approach to analyzing case studies focused on castles, and the teaching methodology is built around this approach. The method is suitable for use in a partially or entirely virtual teaching environment. It is easily adaptable to interactive communication with participants through web meetings.

This article presents an extensive exploration of design education in Africa, with a focus on Ghana, employing storied-ethnography to critically contrast it with conventional western methodologies. It draws upon the narratives of prominent Ghanaian design educators – Sela, Isaac and Patrique – whose experiences and insights emphasize the need to integrate cultural, historical and social realities into the design curriculum. This study uncovers a significant divergence from western educational paradigms, which often prioritize technical proficiency and a universal design approach, potentially neglecting the rich cultural specificities integral to the African context. The research highlights the necessity for a design education system in Africa, particularly in Ghana, that balances technical skill with a deep-rooted connection to local culture and social nuances. It advocates for a model that honours and preserves African cultural heritage while preparing students to make impactful contributions in both local and global design spheres. The findings shed light on the complex nature of design education in Africa, calling for a decolonized, inclusive and culturally sensitive educational model, with profound implications for policy-makers and educators across the continent. Relevance to design practice: This research offers practical insights and strategies for integrating Indigenous knowledge and contemporary methodologies, shaping a more culturally nuanced and globally relevant design practice.

How could one forge a creative dialogue between texts and the physical spaces that they document, imagine or reinvent? This article explores the idea of intersemiotic translation from a work of literature to architecture through a selection of student works produced in an undergraduate elective (Building Texts) offered online in 2020 in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). In the course, students were given the task of ‘building’ the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s internationally acclaimed novel, The Time Regulation Institute (1961) in the form of visual representation. The purpose was not to illustrate the content but trigger an intermedial exchange: Tanpınar’s novel gives a detailed account a fictional modern institute, which serves no purpose other than synchronizing every clock in the country and fine those whose watches are running slow. But the complexity and eclectic character of the architecture, as well as the absurdity of its supposed function, compelled students to go beyond straightforward solutions and minimized the likelihood of ‘translating’ the content into familiar shapes and forms. By introducing one final project in more detail that explores translation as a central theme, the article discusses how such interactions between architecture and literature could be mobilized as an imaginative pedagogical tool. As the project illustrates, students have not only connected textual spaces to the ‘actual spaces’ informing the novel’s narrative structure but also critically resituated these spatial discourses within the mutually dependent social, political and cultural contexts in which they were imagined.

Since building systems play a key role in shaping the final design of a building, knowledge about their foundations has been an integral part of the undergraduate architecture curriculum. However, building systems are often considered by architecture students as engineers’ main responsibility. This mindset has caused inadequate attention in education. VR technology, with its ability to simplify complex concepts through immersive, interactive experiences, offers a promising solution. This study proposes a VR-based building systems-learning (VR-BSL) system, which aims to increasing architectural students’ motivation and engagement in understanding the fundamentals of building systems. A prototype of the VR-BSL system was integrated into the classroom activities, where students and lecturers explored virtual spaces of major building systems using HMDs and controllers. This study demonstrated that VR-BSL enhances learning experience by allowing students to easily grasp distributed information and knowledge through the visualization of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems in the VR.