Developing a design approach, exploring resistance and ambiguity (original) (raw)
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Designing in Skills Nurturing Personal Engagement in Design
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Engaging in knowledge building that is collaborative and that integrates design thinking among interdisciplinary teams is increasingly a means to innovate in product and service design and in business. However, the actual ways this might be accomplished are challenging. These questions are important ones for design educators, researchers and practitioners. This paper studies the question from an educational point of view. It examines what happens when two design researchers and educators, one from an industrial design background and the other a design process oriented background, animate a workshop and how the participants roleplaying various stakeholders engage in design thinking, both as a discovery strategy and through the concept of ‘aesthetic meaning-making’. The workshop aims were to improve collaborative design thinking skills and to explore how a team of experts and non-experts interact within a design project to achieve consensus on goals. During the workshop participants became at once users and makers of emergent results. Two of the participants add their perspectives on how, in this scenario-based workshop project, the exchange of knowledge and learning occurred through both their phenomenological experiences and the collaborative inquiry. They also explain how collaboration among their respective teams resulted in their innovative propositions. Design thinking, complex project scenarios, and collaborative inquiry within interdisciplinary teams, in the context of design education, form the framework of this paper. The process is described, both in terms of the theoretical framework that underlies the concepts of meaning-making with users and as a form of engaging in experiential knowledge generation. The theoretical framework and workshop description introduce these concepts and the workshop engagement and results are presented, with perspectives from the workshop creators, the animator and the participants themselves.
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Education, Design and Practice -Understanding skills in a Complex World
Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World, 2019
This project presents an implemented alternate pedagogical approach utilizing ‘prototypes’ as means of inquiry, investigation, design process and outcome realization. The approach described as “learning by making” , challenges the linear-sequential pedagogical design process commonly implemented in design studios. The presented pedagogical approach (Design and Built) is a well-documented, tried methodology in design schools worldwide. Our unique pedagogical experience stems from its social context and participants’ background. The timeline spans across four academic semesters of three cohorts of female Emirati students and one of male students, who had no prior experience in making nor prototyping. Situated within a consumerism-driven society, the project is seen as a catalyst for change. The participants come from a background that is rich with culture and tradition situated amidst a global and international setting, yet still from an isolated sheltered environment regarding design and manufacturing processes. The process is initiated as knowledge transient with the utilization of fabrication technology aimed at ‘empowering; individuals through experiential learning via ‘making’. The proposed paper highlights an approach that instills ‘maker’ culture’ in collaboration with a design process that utilizes learners’ participation in the community.
Promoting designer oriented thinking through the experience of making
2016
This paper was a part of a research, investigating design methods to enhance creative collaborations between designers and expert users. This part essentially was explored through designing workshops participated by designers and a laboratory chemist. A practice led approach was adopted in which the writer acted both as a researcher and a designer, where observation and reflection served as the method of this work. Through the research, data were collected in the form of video recordings of an interview and a co-design session with the use of mock-ups. The design methods that were explored through this research have enabled expert users to employ designer oriented strategies in design collaborations. The analysis of these workshops has demonstrated that these collaboration strategies can enable the expert users to mobilize their professional experiences and knowledge in design collaborations. The outcome of this research supports the development of further research techniques as wel...
Understanding through Making Keywords: Making, Playing, mechanics, Re-use, Second life The core theme of the paper is incorporating an empirical approach in the understanding of object value(s) within Product Design. It is a reaction too and an acknowledgement of the changing nature of both the students previous experiences and the value of design to the modern world. With the former, applicants lack the breadth of basic skills in drawing, making and experimentation. Indeed many lack a curiosity which is natural to design. This is in part due to the diminishing number of applicants from Foundation Courses in Art and Design (United Kingdom). These pre-degree courses encourage experimentation and play in understanding materials and structures. Another observation is that design has progressed beyond the production of artefacts to a process of problem identification and solving (1). In this context Sustainability, Brand and Human Centred Design are all common themes within design curricula. However focussing on these in an already congested curriculum has left some of the basic skills and investigations lacking in students vocabulary and skills within design. The paper outlines a way in which an understanding of structures and objects can be achieved. Two projects are cited, the first a project which gets students to think with their hands and make quickly. In essence the project is about the deconstruction and re-constructing of chairs. Based on the work of Martino Gamper (2), students are challenged to make new chairs using discarded and broken chairs as source material. Within this construct issues of material and object value can be discussed as well as product lifetime, product evolution and second life. The second project builds on this experience with a mechanical design challenge, that of an Automata. With this project students start investigating on paper but quickly need to develop with simple mechanical mock ups both in 2D and 3D. The combination of these projects amongst others equips students with a preliminary understanding of construction, mechanics, materials and aesthetics. This is a starting point for understanding the physicality of artefacts underpinning Product Design Education. 1. RSA Design & Society Social Animals: tomorrow’s designers in today’s world by Sophia Parker. P19, 2009 2. 100 Chairs in 100 Days
2019
Creative methods can nurture meaning-making and reframing activities during a design process by supporting designers in externalizing and sharing their experiences and observations from field studies and transforming them into new insights. In this article we demonstrate how the method, Object theatre, can be applied as a meaning-making activity and we coin the term 'meaning-mattering' based on the theories of Heron & Reason (2006) and Barad (2007). The meaning-mattering merge the designerly way of thinking and working with creativity to bridges the gap between the experiential knowing obtained through field study observations and the propositional knowing of conceptual reflection as the onto-semantic configuration of Object theatre allows direct verbal and tactile references to be made during the dialogue among designers. This meaning-mattering practice can in a creative manner effectively support the novel development and refinement of both the problem formulation and the ...
Navigating the unknown with design thinking (feeling and action)
Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power”, schools and universities give people access to this knowledge and workplaces require people to put this knowledge into practise as quick as possible. However, the rate of change that Western Society faces today presents us with increasingly complex challenges. Dealing with these kinds of challenges requires a different kind of knowledge, a different way of knowing, and even a way of not-knowing. This is a challenge in a culture where saying “I don’t know” can feel shameful. So more than just a new way of thinking, we need a new approach that involves different ways of seeing, feeling, doing and being that can help people suspend knowing while they co-create together. This paper is about Design Thinking and other complementary Action Methods and how these strategies are being used to navigate the unknown in big, complex, inter-related social problems. This paper suggests that teaching these strategies in schools is not only the best way of teaching divergent thinking and co-creation to pupils, but that this is the way of preparing children for problem solving in an increasingly complex future. Design Thinking is not necessarily about designing things. However, design — by it’s very nature — is about creating something new. Consequently, this requires navigating something previously not-known. Traditional design education is recognised for training divergent thinkers but more importantly, design methodologies develop flexibility in thinking styles and an open way of being, so that learners have the experience of repeatedly shifting from convergent thinking, to divergent thinking and back again. Action Methods such as role play and other methods of concretisation of concepts through physicality have a history of developing spontaneity in participants. In action, traditional thinking such as analysis, is suspended while participants explore feelings and being in the present. These action methods are already being used in large Design Thinking projects across the world by companies such as IDEO, who are leaders in Service Design. In these kinds of projects solutions are co-created with the users and the necessity for empathy towards alternative viewpoints make divergent thinking a must. In summary, this paper will discuss the strategies used in Design Thinking and in Action Methods and how these strategies for thinking, not-thinking, feeling, doing and being could be taught in the classroom to empower our future problem solvers with the knowledge and behaviours needed to navigate ALL our unknown futures.