Creative and collaborative reflective thinking to support policy deliberation and decision making

Background: Co-creation in policymaking is of increasing interest to national governments, and designers play a significant role in its introduction. Aims and objectives: We discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how UK Policy Lab used design methods to gain insight into the design-oriented methods introduced to policymakers’ practices, and how these may influence conventional policy design processes. Methods: This paper reports on the learnings from a two-month participant observation at UK Policy Lab conducted in early 2019. Findings: We found that, beyond human-centred and future-oriented practices, the designers working at this unit appropriate design as a reflective practice for the context of policymaking. We discuss how the use of visual and creative methods of design are utilised by policy designers to facilitate co-creative reflective practices, and how these make a valuable contribution to policymaking practices in UK Government. Discussion and conclusions: As deliberation and decision making is influenced both by what is thought about as well as who is doing the thinking, reflective practices allow notions and assumptions to be unpicked. Moreover, when done as a group activity, reflection leads to a co-production of a deepened understanding of policy challenges.Consequently, we argue, the reflective practices introduced by Policy Lab are an essential contribution to developing a co-creation tradition in evidence-informed policymaking processes Key messages Beyond human-centred and future-oriented methods, UK Policy Lab appropriates design as a reflective practice, to contribute to policymaking by supporting deliberation and decision making. Creative and visual methods from design enable collaborative policymaking processes, as they externalise thinking and surface overlaps and differences among policymakers’ perspectives. We argue that design can support the reflective practice of policymakers, highlighting explicit and implicit frames structuring decision making

Enhancing the Reflective Capabilities of Professional Design Practitioners

According to Schon (1987), professional education should be centred on enhancing the practitioner’s ability to reflect before taking action. This is important to the designer for two reasons. The first of these concerns real world professional situations, which are rarely clear and lack ‘right answers’, the successful professional requires the ability to learn by doing in order to handle complex and unpredictable problems with confidence. The second concerns the nature of the designer’s relationship with design problems themselves. The designer’s exploration of his/her own awareness develops in parallel with problem definition. Dorst and Cross (2001) describe this as a co-evolution of problem and solution and English (2006) argues that we cannot frame the problem without including in that design space the person who designs. Thus the process of engaging with a design problem involves a journey of self-exploration for the designer who needs to be appropriately equipped for unknown terrain. A distance learning Masters programme was validated in 1999, supporting professional designers to develop as reflective practitioners. The course has run successfully for eight years with students based in Brazil, Canada, UK and Ireland, Holland, Greece, Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and China. The author draws on the experience of delivering this programme to describe two approaches that have evolved in parallel to nurture the development of the reflective practitioner. The first of these encourages students to develop an action research process by applying reflective practice models as organising tools and recording templates. The second clarifies direction and focuses action to address fully and precisely the individual student’s aims, insights and motivation. Both these approaches encourage a synergy between practice and theory and involve visual modelling and collaborative reflection through communities of practice. The application of these approaches is shown to generate fundamental insights that positively influence the future actions of students in professional practice. The paper concludes that the consciousness of the expert designer is a critical element of design space and summarises how the disciplined process and clear focus of the approaches discussed contribute to the development of personal confidence and awareness. Keywords: creativity; reflective practice; design process ; design processes</p

Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an ‘experiential’ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people’s performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes – used and developed in designers’ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers’ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of people’s everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies

The Value of Stimulated Dissatisfaction

“I’m not saying it’s a good quality to have, but my observation is that good designers are never happy, they’re never satisfied, never content” (Adrian Stokes, quoted in Spencer, 2008, p. 145). It seems self-evident that designers, whose raison d’être is to initiate change in man-made things (Jones, 1970), devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1969), will be dissatisfied, at some level, with the way they experience the material world. However, recent research (Spencer, 2008) suggests that expert designers deliberately enhance the pressure and stress of the design situation – stimulating dissatisfaction. By stimulating the experience of dissatisfaction their imaginative and investigative action is given urgency, focus and purpose as they pursue excellence and attempt to unfold from their own view of the world to empathise with a broad project community. This discursive paper highlights the need for a developed understanding of the reflective practitioner model to inform the post-rationalist generation of design methods. This paper: reviews critical literature about the experience of designing; discusses the role of dissatisfaction within the practise of design; and presents a research project that aims to evaluate the value of stimulated dissatisfaction for the purpose of supporting practitioners’ empathic appreciation in early design direction generation. This paper argues that the reflective practitioner model of the designer must address the stimulation of dissatisfaction as a condition of creative and explorative design practice

Evaluating Practice-based Learning and Teaching in Art and Design

The University of the Arts London is host to the Creative Learning in Practice Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CLIP CETL), which has funded a number of small course-based evaluative and developmental projects. These projects have been designed by course tutors in conjunction with the CLIP CETL team, who are evaluating them to better understand and extend the pedagogies of practice-based teaching and learning. Practice-based learning is a way of conceptualising and organising student learning which can be used in many applied disciplinary contexts. Such pedagogies we argue are founded on the claim that learning to practice in the creative industries requires engagement with authentic activities in context (Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 2000). This short paper will describe some of the initial evaluation and research activities in two colleges; identify and define practice-based activities in the context of the courses where the research is being carried out; identify emerging pedagogic frameworks; and discuss implications for further development. Activities identified in the projects undertaken include: Opportunities to develop students‟ direct contact with industry Simulating work-based learning in the University Event-based learning Enhancing professional practice and PPD The authors are seeking to elicit, analyse and evaluate what is often implicit in practitioner-teachers, and the experience of developing pedagogies for extending practice-based learning. We will be theorising from statements made by practitioners in semi-structured interviews and evidence provided in progress reporting from the project teams

Developing Australian Academics' Capacity: Supporting the Adoption of Open Educational Practices in Curriculum Design

This seed project initiative addressed an identified gap in Australian higher education between awareness of open educational practices (OEP) and implementation of OEP, particularly the production, adaptation and use of open educational resources (OER) to support the design of innovative, engaging and agile curriculum. In response, the authors aimed to design, develop, pilot and evaluate a free, open and online professional development course focused on supporting curriculum design in higher education. The specific aim of the course - Curriculum design for open education (CD4OE) - is to develop the capacity of academics in Australia to adopt and incorporate OER and OEP into curriculum development, for more effective and efficient learning and teaching across the sector