Chinese international students at University of the Arts London:changing perceptions on creativity

Short paper, presented on Ethnography Track

Design Competencies Futures: How do we REDO Design Education?

Abstract: The REDO biannual Cumulus 2017 conference in Kolding describes “how designers struggle on many levels to gain influence on the decision-making processes” and that we need to “rethink design-doing.” In our professional and didactic experience, designers not always have the language or terminology to convey the depth, value or validity of ‘design-doing’ contributions to these decision-making processes. This raises the question whether design education can do a better job in providing language that can help design students articulate what makes ‘design doing’ so special and relevant. In order to better articulate the value, depth and validity of ‘design doing’ we have developed a framework of design competencies that maybe helpful to other design educators to define, organize and measure the value of ‘design doing’, and help future design practitioners to better understand and communicate the value of what they have learned. After a brief description of the pedagogical context from which the work originated, this paper presents a conference workshop proposal that aims to introduce participants to a framework of ‘design doing’ competencies that allows for diversity and scalability in usage, while appreciating the different cultural, national and regional backgrounds and variations for different design disciplines. In the workshop, we will guide participants through a series of hands-on exercises and ‘visual thinking’ experiences that enable design educators and practitioners to define and detail dynamic, open design competencies in a playful, energizing way. The overarching aim of the workshop is to collaboratively develop a shared language and terminology that helps educators, practitioners and design students to understand, define and communicate the value of ‘design doing’

Using Design Competencies to Define Curricula and Support Learners

This paper presents findings from design research related to a Design Competency Framework (DCF). The DCF is a visually-oriented system for developing curricula in design and is an example of the application of design research to design education. The DCF is divided into a set of sixteen categories including core skills, such as visualisation, and meta competencies such as synthesis. These are presented in the form of a matrix. We see three distinct advantages of using such a system. Firstly the DCF is personalisable at various scales such as individuals, units, courses, and programs. Secondly it is student centred - while we do not assume that design students are passive consumers of their own curricula in non-competency based design education we make the case here for student access to curriculum design processes. The DCF allows students to participate in the design of their own education. Finally, the DCF is resistant to imposition from above and as such questions the modes and institutional dynamics through which design courses come into being

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Paul Wong : Re-Act : Live Art Retrospective

This CD-ROM functions as an anthology and retrospective of the live art and multi-media performance aspects of Wong’s career from the 1970s through the 1990s. His work is represented by video clips (often with the artist’s commentary), interviews, photographs, and essays with hyper-linked text. The information is searchable chronologically or by content, and the disc also contains links to web sites related to Wong. Biographical notes. 15 bibl. ref