Scholarly Shifts
The Exploitation of Design: Does the Push for Experiential Education and High Impact Practices Change Design Education? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brian DeLevie
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 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 twenty-first 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 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?
Narrative as a Vehicle for Learning
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Suresh Sethi, Simrun Sethi
Design involves feelings, and narration helps to instill meaning and emotion in design. Metaphors, analogies, and narratives are powerful tools that help to bring concepts to life. Designers create objects not only as a set of logical propositions but often as a pattern of experiences. Designers link unconnected elements to create new designs. Visual experiences are based on the features of the visible world. These experiences are stored in the unconscious and are manifested through the ideas they generate. Lived experiences that come about through direct perception are a critical factor in the generation of design ideas. The memory of such experiences is made up of a pattern of ideas, thoughts, and images, and by visualizing them, the designer promotes the creation of new connections that didn’t exist before, ones that form the basis for new ideas, and they do this by deliberately blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Narratives provide a way in which designers can explain what they do in an easily understandable, informal style. This research illustrates how the use of narratives improves visualization of product form.
Teaching by Making: From Interior Design to Interior Architecture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Juan Roldan, Camilo Cerro, Daniel Chavez
Since the Bauhaus, industrial design and production have been inherent aspects of the academic learning process. Today we call this system Teaching by Making, and it is intended to remove the design project from the conceptual vacuum of the studio in an attempt to reconcile intellectual design with the realities of the construction process. It is meant to encourage students to collaborate in teams, deal with conflict and learn to manage a project. Currently, we see this teaching methodology more in architecture schools than in interior design programs. Knowing of the success of some of these programs, in 2013 a decision was made to implement hands-on and design/build elements to the interior design curriculum at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. The new program had to start implementing hands-on projects early on in the programs curriculum. This together with furniture making classes allowed the second and third year students to develop the basic skills needed to culminate with a 1:1 design/build project on the first half of their fourth and last year at the university. In time the program evolved into a more interdependent set of courses that revolved around a better understanding of how things are put together to serve the ergonomic needs of the user which added to the program an understanding of structures, sustainability, and design ethics. This paper discusses details of the American University of Sharjah a highly effective interior design program, a top program in the Middle East.
