Dissemination of innovative teaching and learning practice: the Global Studio.

This project aims to disseminate teaching and learning resources from an innovative programme called the Global Studio to the ADM-HEA community. The area of innovation developed in the Global Studio was to link student teams across the globe in ‘designer’ and ‘client’ roles in order to undertake a product development project. This built on and extended the learning philosophy of learning in and through doing provided in a more traditional design studio. Throughout the project students worked in geographically distributed work groups in order to provide them with experience in using skills that would enable them to work successfully in distributed design teams

Boundary crossing: negotiating learning outcomes in industry based student projects.

In order to prepare upcoming Industrial Designers to be able to operate successfully in increasingly complex work settings, the Industrial Design program at the University of Western Sydney is teaming up with industry to provide final year students with industry-based projects. The introduction of Industry-Based Projects into the final year research projects have disrupted many set ways the traditional student projects have been run in the past. Industry-Based Projects have brought to light a number of important issues associated with the assessment process and views held by academics about desired student project outcomes and assessment that were left lying dormant in the past. This paper explores the challenges academics faced negotiating student outcomes and assessment while supervising Industry-Based Projects

The Global Studio - Incorporating Peer-Learning into the Design Curriculum

In ‘tutor-led’ design education, lecturers reside at the centre of teaching & learning activi­ties. We argue that tutor-led design education does not prepare graduates sufficiently for working in highly complex professional capacities. We outline an alternative learning envi­­ron­ment named the Global Studio in which lecturers are more ‘distant’ in pedagogical activities. This ‘distance’ opens up learning spaces which expose students to complex project situations in preparation for professional working life. Global Studio projects are ‘student-led’ and contain explicit opportunities for peer tutoring to ensue. Feedback indicates that learners benefitted from engaging in peer tutoring. However, many students struggled with making important decisions when operating outside of the tutor-led learning environment. To maximise their benefit, we argue that student-led projects featuring peer-tutoring should be scaffolded throughout design programmes to provide students with a sufficient level of expo­sure to this mode of learning.  Image by artist Malcom Jones. http://www.malcomjones.com/index.ht

Rethinking design: from the methodology of innovation to the object of design

The design literature theorizes design as the methodology of innovation, supposedly required for mediating the world’s separate entities, such as theory and practice, the human and the material, and subjective and objective knowing, coming ‘naturally’ with the designer’s ways of knowing. But instead of taking such naturalizations for granted, we arguethat through such positioning of design the specifics of design activity are obscured, along with the locations designers take within them. We propose that ‘design as a methodology’ is an object produced by design. Investigating this object of design, and how it is made, will make visible what design activity is, and what locations the designers take within them

Redefining innovation processes: The digital designers at work

As design in digital innovation has become a thing, we highlight the inconclusive concepts that describe design activity in innovation processes. Proposing an alternative theoretical lens - a sociomaterial practice lens - we claim that this view can reveal the contribution of digital designers to the work of innovation. This paper draws on a research study with digital designers in the UK. At the same time as we begin to reconceptualise the ways digital design activity can be described, we also illustrate a theoretical framework based on 1) action and knowing as ordered by collectively produced objects, 2) sociomateriality and the configuration of human bodies and materials in action, 3) the co-emergence of objects and sociomaterial configurations where each is the condition of the other. This alternative way of looking at design activity may pose some challenges to the theoretical traditions in the field. We however believe that it contains immense potential too

Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences

Structure and play: rethinking regulation in the higher education sector.

This paper explores possible tactics for academics working within a context of increasing regulation and constraint. One suggested tactic is to move outside of a creativity-conformity binary. Rather than understanding creativity and conformity as separable, where one is seen as excluding the other, the authors consider the potential of examining the relationships between them. The theme of 'structure and play' illustrates the argument. In the first part of the paper, using various examples from art and design - fields generally associated with creativity - the authors explore the interrelatedness of creativity and conformity. For example, how might design styles, which are generally understood as creative outcomes, constrain creativity and lead to conformity within the design field? Is fashion producing creativity or conformity? Conversely, the ways in which conformity provides the conditions for creativity are also examined. For example, the conformity imposed by the state on artists in the former communist bloc contributed to a thriving underground arts movement which challenged conformity and state regulation. Continuing the theme of 'structure and play', the authors recount a story from an Australian university which foregrounds the ongoing renegotiation of power relations in the academy. This account illustrates how programmatic government in a university, with its aim of regulating conduct, can contribute to unanticipated outcomes. The authors propose that a Foucauldian view of distributed power is useful for academics operating in a context of increasing regulation, as it brings into view sites where power might begin to be renegotiated