Educational Links
Ideas Without Walls: Interdisciplinary Speakers Forum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jon Jicha
Ideas Without Walls is a public forum for play. Designed to integrate discourse about trans-disciplinary concepts in contemporary culture, the mission of this speaker series is to debate traditional paradigm models. The goal is to develop dialogue, identify challenges, and encourage potential opportunities for imagination within our unpredictable world. This annual event began in 2012 at Western Carolina University to bring together educators, students, and practicing design professionals into a challenging environment for discourse on relevant contemporary design issues.
A Call for a Disruption in Architectural Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fay Al Khalifa, Layla Karajica
Architecture disciplines border between the applied and social sciences. Architects are expected to have the theoretical sophistication to understand and respond to the challenges of urbanization and to also be equipped with the technical means that allows them to apply their solutions into the built environment. This, however, is not necessarily reflected in the way architecture is being taught at design schools. There is an ever-existing gap between what the market needs and what students are learning in school, which eventually hinders the progression of urban development at the national level and the implementation of good solutions to the built environment. Research has been calling for a new paradigm in architectural education; however, little empirical evidence supported such a shift locally. This research examines this gap between architectural education and its practices in Bahrain and attempts to re-design the architectural curriculum at the University of Bahrain to respond to this separation between knowledge and practice.
Artanddesign - Is it One or Two Words?: A Framework for Design Students to Critically Distinguish Design Praxis from Artistic Agency
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Martin
Graphic design educators often resist efforts to distinguish "design" from "art." However, because of the easily accessible similarities of processes, mediums, concerns, and displays between art and design students left without a critical comparison of these two creative endeavors often develop for themselves a frame of intent, interest, and assessment that serves the development of an artistic agency more than orientating them to the praxis of design. Unintentionally, this limited reflexivity of their creative abilities and interests suppresses the students' awareness and aspirations related to design's potential for impact and the level of objectivity required. On the other hand, design educators who do employ a distinction between the functions of art and design frequently employ definitions that confine design's scope to serve a didactic pedagogy dedicated to a more singular and linear mode of design practice obliged solely to a client-driven service thereby limiting a student's consideration of the potential forms of design practice and impact. These two common occurrences show that the proximity of art and design creates a dialectic that design education must address. This paper proposes a framework of critical reflection for design educator's to facilitate student consideration of how design praxis is distinct from artistic agency. This framework is oriented to Paulo Freire's perspective of a critical pedagogy to enable consideration of the relevance and value of this distinction as a basis of liberating the potential within each of these noble human endeavors while managing the complexities of identity politics that disciplinary comparison often entices.
