Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

In the last five years, some inescapable challenges regarding the future of higher education have emerged including ever-increasing student costs, online competition, and a decreasing available student population. These significant forces, coupled with student and industry demands for education to be more practical and applicable to the “workaday” world, have universities adopting a range of approaches in the form of experiential education and high impact practices (HIP). This shift in pedagogy and focus by universities towards experiential and HIP’s initiatives across campuses present both opportunities and challenges to university design programs who, traditionally, have been the exponents of experiential education through their studio and design practices where a variety of proficiencies needed to succeed in the 21st-century workforce including flexibility, leadership, adaptability, entrepreneurialism, and creativity (Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, 2018) are stressed. Through examining the systemic underpinnings of experiential and HIP’s initiatives this paper asks the following questions: How can design avoid being maligned and advocate for a leadership role in the creation, planning, and implementation of experiential education? What can design overcome entrenched academic stereotypes and demonstrate that, at its heart, design has, and continue to be, an approach to solving problems that make it useful in the face of complicated issues? Can and should design programs and faculty shift from their traditional forms of practice and use their methods to introduce and educate students on ways to use creativity for ends beyond those of traditional design practice?