- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Artifact
- Previous Issues
- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019
Artifact - Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2019
Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2019
-
-
Comparing employability priorities of emerging and experienced interior designers
Authors: Amy M. Huber and Lisa K. WaxmanAbstractWhile design scholars have long explored the design process and its underlining decision-making tactics, few empirical studies have examined other judgements that may also influence design practice, such as the skills and contributions of new hires and their fit with their firms’ management style, culture and values. To probe employability priorities, this study first explored broad-based and discipline-specific literature, accreditation standards, and recent position announcements from interior design practice. Next, in order to define those skills and traits most highly valued in commercial interior design, new quantitative survey data was collected from emerging interior designers, and, in turn, was compared to extant research findings on the hiring priorities of experienced management practitioners within the interior design consultancy industry. Survey responses support earlier findings emphasizing soft skills while contributing to the literature by highlighting differing priorities between experienced interior designers and those whom they are likely to hire (i.e. emerging design professionals). Such differing priorities may have resonance in allied design disciplines, which is discussed with implications for design management hiring practice, emerging design professionals’ employability efforts, and practices of educators aiming to enhance the employability of design graduates.
-
-
-
Investigating design-based learning ecologies
Authors: Bruce Snaddon, Andrew Morrison, Peter Hemmersam, Andrea Grant Broom and Ola ErstadAbstractIn this article we argue that, for educators in design, urbanism and sustainability, the responsibility of connecting emergent design practice and changing societal needs into pedagogical activities demands that attention be given to ecologies of learning that explore the interplay between what is and what might be. As such, this futuring imperative brings into play a mix of modes of situated learning experience, communication and tools from design and learning to query the planned and built environment as a given, while offering alternate future visions and critiques. In this article, we argue for agile pedagogy that enables students to co-create as citizens in public spaces, through agentive multimodal construction of their identities and modes of transformative representation. Our core research problematic is how to develop, enact and critique design-based pedagogies that may allow designer-educator-researchers and students alike to co-create learning ecologies as dynamic engagement in re-making the city. This we take up within the wider context of climate change and pressing societal and environmental needs within which design and urbanism education increasingly needs to be oriented. Our inquiry is located within a shared practice of design pedagogy across two continents, and climatic and disciplinary domains between the western cape in South Africa and the far north of Norway. The main finding of this research is that pedagogies that are enabling of and attentive to the interplay of an assemblage of relational context-sensitive modalities can be conducive to sustainable and futuring design-based urban engagements.
-
-
-
Can participatory design support the transition into innovative learning environments?
By Bodil BøjerAbstractWhen changing from traditional classrooms to innovative learning environments it is crucial to include the users of the environment in the design process. However, participatory processes might be limited by contrasting expertise, cultures, priorities or project restrictions, which poses a risk to the alignment of spatial design and pedagogical practices. To meet this challenge, the article proposes a post-design participatory activation process aimed to support the transition into new learning spaces. This is exemplified in an empirical case, where co-design methods and physical design objects have been explored as tools to foster spatial literacy and competencies in a fifth-grade cohort (teachers and students), and potentially match pedagogical practices with spatial affordances. Participatory activation is believed to be an ongoing process because learning environments are not static designs – they keep evolving based on people, pedagogies and practices.
-
-
-
Experiments all the way in programmatic design research
Authors: Anne Louise Bang and Mette Agger EriksenAbstractExperiments take various forms, have various purposes, and generate various knowledge; depending on how, when and why they are integrated in a design research study with a programmatic approach. This is what we will argue for throughout this article using examples and experiences from our now finalized Ph.D. studies. Reviewing the prevailing literature on research through design the overall argument is that design experiments play a core role both in conducting the research, in theory construction and in knowledge generation across the different design domains and methodological directions. However, we did not identify sources that explicitly discuss and operationalize roles and characteristics of design experiments in different stages of programmatic design research. The aim of this article is therefore to outline a (tentative) systematic account of roles and characteristics of design experiments. Building upon Schön’s definition of experiments in practice we propose adding to the prevailing understanding of experiments in research through design understanding and operationalizing design experiments (1) as initiators or drivers framing a research programme, (2) as ways to reflect on and mature the research programme serving as vehicles for theory construction and knowledge generation and finally (3) as a ‘designerly’ approach to the written knowledge dissemination and clarification of research contributions.
-
-
-
Design Innovation for creative growth: Modelling relational exchange to support and evaluate creative enterprise in the Scottish Highlands and Islands
Authors: Michael Pierre Johnson, Lynn-Sayers McHattie and Katherine ChampionAbstractThis article examines the development and delivery of a Creative Growth Model as part of a programme of Design Innovation activities with creative micro-enterprises and support organizations in the Highlands and Islands region of Scotland. There is a growing body of critique for how creative enterprise is framed, supported and evaluated in relation to economic notions of value and growth that struggle to incorporate the sociocultural interests and activities of sole traders and micro-enterprises. This article presents a Design Innovation approach for identifying situated conceptions of value, modelled as emergent value constellations, based on the diverse interactions and relational exchanges prevalent within the creative enterprise. This research draws predominantly on the work of Design Innovation for New Growth (DING), a two-year AHRC follow-on funded project between 2017 and 2019, which engaged with existing creative expertise in the Highlands and Northern Isles of Scotland to mobilize local practitioners as central drivers of innovation. The article aims to contribute to co-design literature seeking to develop ‘design practices that understand how value is co-produced, […] understood, generated, and employed’ (Whitham et al. 2019: 2) in conjunction with creative enterprises.
-
-
-
Review
Authors: Stig Lyngaard Hansen, Camilla Ryan Sørensen and Margrethe BredahlAbstractBloomsbury Applied Visual Arts
Online Library (2019), New York: Bloomsbury Publications, https://www.bloomsburyappliedvisualarts.com/
-