Re-tooling (Asynchronous Session)
Instagram + Community: An Integrated Approach to Contemporary Design Pedagogy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicole Peterson
The current generation of students utilize a variety of social media platforms to gain knowledge about the world around them. The research methods of the past and distribution of findings have evolved into technology-based methods, creating quick access to more information than ever before. In this case study, students were assigned to use Instagram as a way to share their experiences with materials found in architecture and interior design. Students used social media to catalog current materials available to utilize in their designs, as well as historic buildings on campus and beyond in their travels outside of the classroom. Interior design students were tasked to study materials found in spaces around them, and publish their findings weekly via Instagram. The students were encouraged to share their experience with design and the materials in the built environment that they found interesting, and relate their post to the weekly lecture topics. Peer learning became an integral part of the assignment, opening up students to the design lens of others. Discussion with the instructor and other students became a key component in the project. A student reflection on the assignment was conducted to evaluate learning outcome success. Instagram, used as a place to connect and exchange ideas, was used to enhance the educational learning outcomes in a course within a large lecture classroom. Students were encouraged to remain engaged with one another on Instagram after the class concluded, continuing community beyond the classroom.
Interdisciplinary Languages: Interpreting Instructions through Making View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chelsea Limbird
This paper introduces the work of a studio-based seminar investigating reflection, translation, and transformation in the creative process, in order to further focus in and, at the same time, expand the work. Students initially question the definition of “portrait”. Through research of contemporary and historical references, students reframe the possible contexts and contents of the established definition. These foundations illuminate the possibilities of “portrait” and the definition becomes elastic as it stretches to incorporate the author of the work. The students proceed, in looking back to go forward, culminating in the creation of a set of instructions, underlining process as portrait, revealing the way that we make as yet another signature in the work. At this pinnacle, students exchange these instructions with one another and create, interpreting, translating and forming, further underscoring the languages we all speak to ourselves in the creative process. In times of crisis and in times of calm, there is a fundamental need for communication. What does this mean? How do we communicate to each other? How do we communicate to ourselves? This paper proposes a way, to reveal and to begin a dialogue, between ourselves and our students, what languages we speak with our work, the way we might speak to each other across disciplines, across cultures, across space, and across time. I am not proposing answers, I am proposing a conversation.
Designing a Toolbox to Improve Creative Output: A Guide for Cultivating Critical, Creative, and Conceptual Thinking Skills in an Increasingly Distracted Society View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cara Tuttle
Frequent digital distractions can hamper undergraduate design students’ ability to perform the kind of deeper level thinking needed for creative problem solving and creative output, yet there are tools that can help students focus on the present and delve deeper into their creative work. This paper focuses on the details of a pedagogical toolbox created for educators of undergraduate design students to target critical thinking, creative thinking, and conceptual thinking (the 3Cs) in order to improve creative output. I explain how critical, creative, and conceptual thinking work holistically to develop and promote creative output. By demonstrating 3Cs tools and activities, I provide educators with ideas and methods for challenging students to be present, think creatively and critically, and build conceptual awareness. Through testing, refinement, and adaptation of the tools, I collect data through student surveys and compare creative output results between control groups for one particular tool. I aim to prove that creative output is not fixed, but can be developed and strengthened with practice, time, and the right tools. Customization of the toolbox tailored to what is most effective for individual educators’ pedagogy, course content, and students’ critical, creative, and conceptual thinking abilities is explained. This paper also acknowledges our reliance on digital technology and how it can be leveraged to engage creative thinking in the online spaces where students spend their time.
The Reinvented Design Studio : Transforming Design Education to Fight Climate Change View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Fleming
This paper outlines the innovations necessary to effectively teach sustainable design. Current design methodologies are effective at helping students achieve aesthetically and formalistically successful design projects, but they are not well adapted to deal with emerging knowledge areas necessary to fight climate change. For example, students require a new set of mental maps that can tap into their ability to think empathically into the future; Think across vast scales to consider the global impacts of their design solutions; and the ability to think across differences in race, class and gender. Furthermore, the design processes themselves are poorly ordered, meaning that sustainability considerations are added at the end of the process leading to superficial if not disingenuous final solutions. Lastly, standard design processes are not geared to achieve critical sustainability metrics such as carbon neutrality, net-zero energy use, water savings, and supply chain impacts. This paper shares the results of a multi-year effort to completely reinvent the design studio to better meet metrics, better meet a higher bar for empathetic thinking, and to better order design steps so that sustainability is integrated into the student’s thinking continuously through the design process. The paper will include examples of students work, sample templates used to organize thinking, and a set of diagrams that are used s roadmaps for students to find their way towards life-enhancing, sustainable, and in the end design solutions that may, in fact, actually help our society fight climate change.
