Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand design majors’ conceptions of design and approaches to learning design in Taiwan. Thirty students majoring in design volunteered to participate in the interview for this study, and the phenomenographic method was used to analyze the interview data. In this study, some conceptions of and approaches to design were identified; especially, all of the design major students expressed the most important conception of design as “design is regarded as a plan for organizing all of the procedures” and the main approach to learning design as “collecting related information for learning design.” Moreover, it was found that most of the students expressed mixed conceptions of as well as a mixed approach to learning design. Finally, an important tendency regarding students’ conceptions and approaches was found, that is, the design-major students with a fragmented conception of design (e. g., design is regarded as a subjective perspective with high uncertainty) tended to use a surface approach (e. g., imitating some good works for learning design) to learning design.