Design Education as a Catalyst for Change (original) (raw)
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Design Education as a Change Agent
The multiple environmental and socioeconomic challenges confronting humanity today, and a contemporary context that presents the promise of perpetual connectivity and accelerated patterns in information consumption and creation, represent powerful global forces that are shaping the way we live, work and learn. Such pressures and opportunities on an international scale are affecting design education in significant ways, creating an unprecedented need to deliver knowledge, experience and sophistication upon a global playing field. The college-wide initiative Designmatters at Art Center College of Design advocates for applied research approaches to complex humanitarian issues and provides unique methodologies for creative reform and change, empowering a new generation of designers to imagine critical solutions for society’s future well-being.
Design as an agent of change: Practice-oriented initiatives on Design Teaching
The paper analyzes the role of Design as an agent of social transformation in face of complex challenges. Intentionally embracing reality’s complexity and centering on human values, the Design approach is suited to develop alternative perspectives and radically different strategies for change. The paper explores Design teaching focusing on social change and transition to sustainability, presenting three initiatives and reflecting about methods and impacts of the application of Design for transition. The analysis points to the need of a critical vision in Design research and teaching and the importance to systematize and teach methods and tools to support the interplay among diverse social actors.
Design Citizens: Is Education a Catalyst for Systemic Change?
2016
Design programs educate students not just in theoretical aspects of design but in its professional practice and ways to use the skills afforded by their professions to be more competitive, corporate, and exploitative. Many design programs are also centering curriculums on using design as means for systemic change through educating their students on ways to create practices that stem from the concept of being a good “design citizen” – that is, a designer who uses professional practice and the skills afforded by their professions to be inclusive, powerful and cooperative. Using Design Activism as a central tenet makes pedagogical sense as it empowers, directs and engages students on a level well beyond themselves and their “connected” lives. It encompasses a wide range of real-life, business, social and environmental engaged actions. Additionally, it includes processes that innovate forms of creative practice, providing branding models by which designers might work, or challenge exist...
Design Education Can Change the World
ACM IX Journal, 2019
We built a new studio-based design education to graduate students as responsible stewards of technology. Creating this program involved dozens of senior designers from San Francisco and Silicon Valley organizations. We found that it takes great care and new-to-the-world thinking. This paper presents the journey and early impact of creating the BFA and Master's program at a social-justice dedicated art and design school in San Francisco.
The present paper intends to present the early stage on a bigger attempt to discuss design education and its role in a paradigm shift moment, pointing the need to change how designers think and learn to face wicked problems in a more complex society. New active methodologies will be considered in order to promote a teaching-learning process that reinforces the construction of new competencies, which increases students' perception of the reality that surrounds them and makes them evident the impact of design processes and solutions. This conceptual broadening will make them more socially responsible agents, aware of the importance of their civic action and active role towards innovation, social wellbeing, and Sustainability.
Designerly Ways of Transforming Design Education: A Review of Design Curricula Reforms Worldwide
DS 110: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (EPDE 2021), 2021
In recent years, the responsibilities of designers have drastically shifted as the world we live in becomes increasingly more complex. Correspondingly, educators advocate for an adaptation of design education in relation to the shifting economy, technological and societal advances. The question therefore is how to design the future of design education in a way that it corresponds better to these shifts. Traditionally, university curricula are updated on a department level together with faculty members. Under this localized practice, programs update one course at a time. During this routine hardly any other stakeholders are involved. By reviewing universities' practices around the world towards reforming their curricula, it was found that design programs can benefit from shifting towards a systemic, design-based, and research-through-design approach, specifically, by using design research methodologies, namely, co-creation, stakeholder involvement, questionnaires, trend analysis, benchmarking, focus groups, interviews, prototyping and the application of an iterative mindset. In agreement with Cross (1982), the authors call for a more designerly way of thinking in order to update design curricula. By reconsidering conventional approaches regarding curricula reform practices, this paper presents recommendations for designing design education to define future university study programs.
Design as a Catalyst: A Pedagogical Framework
2020
There is an increasing interest in the design and creative thinking process in the Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and health education disciplines. Many new degree programs are integrating design thinking into their syllabi. The
Seeds of engagement: design conversations for educational change
Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2007
Change models revolve around communication between designers and adopters, but the processes involved are far less often the focus of our scholarship. We present design conversation as an inclusive, participatory avenue to designing educational changes and as a legitimate focus of design scholarship. Design conversation sits apart from other forms of communication, such as dialectic conversation and discussions, in which opinions are staked out and defended. Design conversation is a group endeavour where a group searches for common meaning and designs a new entity. Design conversation is linked here to the need for a systems approach to educational change. We discuss this need; describe the nature of design conversation, its theoretical foundation in systems thinking and its use for educational systems design. The direction and nature of communication in selected change models is then compared to design conversation and, finally, its implications for educational systems design are discussed.
2019
This paper describes the methodology of a workshop done with design students during the Design Week of Mérida, at Universidad de Extremadura – Spain. The activity was based on the premise that – due to the growing complexity of the challenges faced by society today – designers need to act as part of the solution being agents of change. The workshop discussed the skills, methods, and partnerships for design to achieve such a change on its approach and how Design Education plays a part in preparing the future generation of designers to tackle social innovation and sustainability problems. The results showed how the students understand the future of design and the possibilities for improvement in a system that struggles to be resilient and respond at a faster pace.