Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Design is the co-evolution between problem and solution but to frame a design problem in fashion education, mainstream pedagogical strategies typically direct students to trending fashion themes and secondary visual research to evoke subjective feelings, inspiration, imagination and interpretation to drive design from an inward-looking practice. Although this pedagogical strategy may have sufficed in the past, empirical evidence foreground problems associated with such an approach. Forming part of a PhD focussed on fashion education in the South African context, this paper serves a two-fold purpose. Firstly, the problems associated with students applying secondary visual research to drive practice is explored. Secondly, the author reports on a role-played pedagogical strategy implemented with first-year fashion students to support learning via systematic and objective framing of a design problem around actual user needs, preferences and context of use through qualitative primary research methods as opposed to secondary visual data. In this situation, fashion students collaborated in design teams with one student assuming the role of designer and the other as user. Guided by qualitative research, a semi-structured interview was conducted with a fashion educator to address the first purpose. Responding to the second purpose, data collection methods entailed the author’s participant observations and self-created photographs aimed at documenting student research-related activities in framing the design problem. The paper begins with scholarship around mainstream pedagogical strategies in fashion education and then shift to the qualitative research strategy employed for this paper. Subsequently, discussions shift to empirical findings emerging from this research endeavour.