A Thick Industrial Design Studio Curriculum

This presentation was part of the session : Pedagogy: Procedures, Scaffolds, Strategies, Tactics24th National Conference on the Beginning Design StudentThis paper describes an industrial design studio course based in a private university in Izmir, Turkey where second year industrial design students, for the first time, engage in a studio project. The design studio course emphasises three distinct areas of competence in designing that are the focus of the curriculum. They are; design process: the intellectual act of solving a design problem; design concept: the imagination and sensibility to conceive of appropriate design ideas; and presentation: the ability to clearly and evocatively communicate design concepts. The studio is 'thick' with materials, tasks and activities that are intentionally sequenced to optimise learning in a process that is known as educational 'scaffolding.' The idea of a process--a patient journey toward it's destination, is implicit in the studio that is full of opportunities for reflection-in-action. A significant feature is the importance placed on drawing and model making. An exemplary design process should show evidence of 'breadth'--meaning a wide search for solutions where a range of alternatives explored throughout; followed by an incremental refinement of the chosen solution where elements of the final design concept are developed thoroughly and in detail--called 'depth.' Learning to design is predicated on an engagement in and manipulation of the elements of the design problem. Evidence of that learning will be found by examining the physical materials and results of the design process. The assessment criteria are published with the brief at the outset of design project and outcomes are spelt out at the end. Students are remind throughout project of the criteria, which is to say they are reminded of pedagogical aims of the studio. Assessment criteria are detailed and the advantages of summative assessment are described

Captured voices in primary school art education.

Eisner (1972) articulated a long-standing orientation in art education as he described the triadic relationship between socio-centric, child-centred and discipline-centred approaches in art education praxis. Hickman (2005) observed that teachers and students are now positioned to embrace a wider range of discourses as to what art might be. This impacts on why students make art and how it is taught. Wider arts discourse has resulted in influential paradigms and historically preferred arts pedagogies (Efland, 2002, 2004; Eisner, 1972; Kerlavage, 1992; Price, 2005). These discourses influence policy, curriculum, teacher beliefs about art and ultimately the ways in which these influences are played out in classrooms. Eisner (2002) argued the need for "empirically grounded examples of artistic thinking related to the nature of the tasks students engage in, the materials they work with, the context's norms and the cues the teacher provides to advance their students thinking" (p. 217). This paper draws on such theory and a two year action-research project, The Art of the Matter (Fraser et al., 2006) involving case studies and analysis. This paper focuses on a Year 4 to Year 6 'drawing into painting' context taught by experienced generalist teachers in New Zealand primary schools. The influence of school culture and programme structures is explored. I raise questions as to which socio-cultural and discipline-centred voices generalist teachers have been captured by, and consider to what extent it possible to still discern a student whisper under the clamour and control of adult proscribed activity

Beyond words: Aesthetic knowledge and knowing in design

Aesthetic knowledge comes from practitioners understanding the look, feel, smell, taste and sound of things. It is vital to work in many organizational contexts. In this paper, we explore aesthetic knowledge and knowing in organizations through detailed observation of design work in the architectural practice Edward Cullinan Architects. Through our research, we explore aesthetic knowledge in the context of architectural work, we unpack what it is, how it is generated, and how it is applied in design projects, shared between practitioners and developed at the level of the organization. Our analysis suggests that aesthetic knowledge plays an important part in organizational practice, not only as the symbolic context for work, but as an integral part of the work that people do. It suggests that aesthetic reflexivity, which involves an opening up and questioning of what is known, is experienced as part of practice as well as a `time out' from practice

Representation of industrial products in the early stages of design: Drawing and artistic expression in industrial design

Comunicació presentada a ICERI 2018 11th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (Seville, Spain. 12-14 November, 2018)Hand drawing is a basic tool for industrial designers, as it allows them to represent and communicate concepts in an agile way during the initial design phase. Although we can find subjects related to drawing in the first years of all university degrees in industrial design, the way to implement the necessary activities is not always the most appropriate, and it may happen that, despite having practiced sketching, at the end of the course the students do not have the necessary skills to communicate their ideas effectively or adequately represent the reality that surrounds them. This paper proposes twelve groups of activities designed to help industrial design students acquire skills related to hand drawing. The activities were implemented during the second course of the Degree in Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering at Universitat Jaume I, improving those implemented during the last course. The paper analyzes and discusses the positive results of the innovations introduced, which improved the mean grade of the course by 4.48% with respect to the grade obtained the previous year

Sketching space

In this paper, we present a sketch modelling system which we call Stilton. The program resembles a desktop VRML browser, allowing a user to navigate a three-dimensional model in a perspective projection, or panoramic photographs, which the program maps onto the scene as a `floor' and `walls'. We place an imaginary two-dimensional drawing plane in front of the user, and any geometric information that user sketches onto this plane may be reconstructed to form solid objects through an optimization process. We show how the system can be used to reconstruct geometry from panoramic images, or to add new objects to an existing model. While panoramic imaging can greatly assist with some aspects of site familiarization and qualitative assessment of a site, without the addition of some foreground geometry they offer only limited utility in a design context. Therefore, we suggest that the system may be of use in `just-in-time' CAD recovery of complex environments, such as shop floors, or construction sites, by recovering objects through sketched overlays, where other methods such as automatic line-retrieval may be impossible. The result of using the system in this manner is the `sketching of space' - sketching out a volume around the user - and once the geometry has been recovered, the designer is free to quickly sketch design ideas into the newly constructed context, or analyze the space around them. Although end-user trials have not, as yet, been undertaken we believe that this implementation may afford a user-interface that is both accessible and robust, and that the rapid growth of pen-computing devices will further stimulate activity in this area

Who's Better? Who's Best? Pairwise Deep Ranking for Skill Determination

We present a method for assessing skill from video, applicable to a variety of tasks, ranging from surgery to drawing and rolling pizza dough. We formulate the problem as pairwise (who's better?) and overall (who's best?) ranking of video collections, using supervised deep ranking. We propose a novel loss function that learns discriminative features when a pair of videos exhibit variance in skill, and learns shared features when a pair of videos exhibit comparable skill levels. Results demonstrate our method is applicable across tasks, with the percentage of correctly ordered pairs of videos ranging from 70% to 83% for four datasets. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach via sensitivity analysis of its parameters. We see this work as effort toward the automated organization of how-to video collections and overall, generic skill determination in video.Comment: CVPR 201

Designers Who Don’t Draw: An Investigation into Sketch Inhibition among Undergraduate Designers

Sketch inhibition in undergraduate designers is a phenomenon widely acknowledged by educators, yet one garnering little attention from the academy. Defined as a reluctance or inability to use sketching effectively, it impacts negatively upon design ideation and the representation, evaluation and communication of information essential for successful design. The uniqueness of sketching was confirmed by the study; as a personalised icon-based language, a method of cognitive support for mental imagery and a tool for analysis. Ideation - the combination of intrinsically linked micro-activities within mental imagery and their representation - relies upon effective offloading of the working memory, the sketch being an irreplaceable tool for this purpose. Sketch inhibition is a complex behavioural phenomenon with single or multiple causes. These include, but are not limited to, skill-set deficiency, social anxiety and previous negative educational experience. Symptoms include reluctance to engage, deferral to other tools and poor quality design output. Effects are embodied in the inability to conceptualise and develop design information effectively, with impact graduate employability and commercial activity. Although purported to be integral to design higher education, considerable problems exist regarding its teaching and use at strategic, institutional and pedagogic levels. This includes the erroneous assumption that sketching is an intuitive activity that need not be taught. Examples of best practice suggest that, much like language, it needs to be formally taught and practised in order to develop both vocabulary and fluency in its use, in order that it can support design ideation successfully. This study applies a Grounded Theory approach to investigation of sketch inhibition and subsequently formulates a theory of the phenomenon. A pedagogic framework for sketch inhibition within design education is presented and evaluated, suggesting the command of it is possible - and on the part of the sufferer, even enjoyable.De Montfort Universit

From on-line sketching to 2D and 3D geometry: A fuzzy knowledge based system

The paper describes the development of a fuzzy knowledge based prototype system for conceptual design. This real time system is designed to infer user’s sketching intentions, to segment sketched input and generate corresponding geometric primitives: straight lines, circles, arcs, ellipses, elliptical arcs, and B-spline curves. Topology information (connectivity, unitary constraints and pairwise constraints) is received dynamically from 2D sketched input and primitives. From the 2D topology information, a more accurate 2D geometry can be built up by applying a 2D geometric constraint solver. Subsequently, 3D geometry can be received feature by feature incrementally. Each feature can be recognised by inference knowledge in terms of matching its 2D primitive configurations and connection relationships. The system accepts not only sketched input, working as an automatic design tools, but also accepts user’s interactive input of both 2D primitives and special positional 3D primitives. This makes it easy and friendly to use. The system has been tested with a number of sketched inputs of 2D and 3D geometry