Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Graphic design is a well-established, and popular education pathway in Malaysia. Nevertheless, teaching and learning have little research. Perhaps, an analysis of current instructional approaches to match P21’s Framework for Twenty-first Century Learning could provide enlightenment towards new teaching and learning methods. Therefore, the key assessment on teaching graphic design should take into consideration learners’ creativity and innovation; critical thinking and problem-solving skill; as well as ability to communicate and collaborate. It is important to integrate critical and creative thinking skills across the subject matters. Creative thinking skills are highly recommended to integrate into practical modules so that learners can be encouraged to think differently or out of the box. However, most institutions gave short shift to critical and creative thinking skills and hardly incorporate with theoretical and practical teaching of Graphic Design. As a result, the curriculum does not prepare the learners to meet the demands of real-world practice. These demands presuppose that graduates in Graphic Design do possess the necessary faculty of creative thinking to originate ideas and connect learned knowledge into project-based applications. It is imperative to implement a better and practical pedagogy that infuses CCT into the program curricula to produce graduate outcomes that are in line with industry and professional demands. This research aims to develop a new Integrated Creative Activity Instruction (ICAI), which infuses thinking skill to improve graphic design learning. The instruction framework is mainly derived from Affordance Theory of Gibson (1986) and Marzano New Taxonomy (2000).