Design education in higher education
- Submitting institution
-
Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 6056
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
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- Book title
- A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945
- Publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell
- ISBN
- 978-1-119-11118-4
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 10,000-word chapter explores whether the vocational nature of design is best served within the context of developing an academic profession as currently directed under university cultures and regulations in English-speaking universities. It undertakes a critical review of the literature popular in educational development to demonstrate the weaknesses when it comes to understanding how design is learned, the changing nature of the design discipline’s boundaries, and what design graduates are expected to demonstrate when they enter a design profession.
In response to this critique, it establishes a framework of designerly attributes which emphasise the paradoxical nature of design in higher education as representing simultaneously both a vocational education with implicit foundational aspects (and associated identities) and an academic profession which demands higher degrees of thinking, making and doing.
The chapter is the outcome of a mixed experiential method in which research into studio learning undertaken in Glasgow School of Art in 2015 is incorporated into a bigger critical literature review of university approaches to design education. The outcomes generate an original approach to design higher education by challenging increasingly taken for granted generic understandings of how learning ‘works’ in higher education.
Its key insights are: 1) how we understand design in higher education is currently underdetermined with too much emphasis on research/teaching separation; 2) a paradigm for analysing student learning in Design could be best achieved through 4 foundational outcomes: sophisticated visual literacy; fluency in overall and sub-disciplinary materiality; ambiguity management; and social interactionism, all of which are served by a pragmatic ability to complete projects; and 3) that higher educational research concerning disciplinary learning and teaching would be improved through a closer interface with the emerging innovations in service design research methods, rather than the more generic educational research methods that have come to dominate.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
