The threshold of uncertainty in teaching design

In many of our universities and colleges there is a long established approach to teaching design through practice. For most students their end goal is to achieve a level of capability to function as designers in the professional world. Their education helps them construct a passport to enter this community of professional practice. Part of the legacy of the funding initiative in England to support research into teaching has been the development of a better understanding of a practice-based approach to design pedagogy. This was a principal focus in two centres funded by the initiative in which ‘signature pedagogies’ were identified as a distinguishing characteristic for developing student capability within various types of design practice, each of which contains those elements, which are characteristic of the discipline. This notion moves the emphasis away from the content of the curriculum and explores the importance of practical, embodied and experiential ways of knowing. Where these were investigated for product and automotive design the concept of transformative practice was identified as crucial. Designers typically employ two simultaneous interacting cognitive styles. From a five-year longitudinal study involving 89 design students, it became clear that in order to develop the confidence to match these two modes of thought, neophyte designers needed to surmount a barrier, or a threshold concept, which we labelled the toleration of of design uncertainty. Accommodating effective arrangements to accomplish this has reinforced the importance of employing the traditional arrangement of studio teaching and given it a greater focus

Developing empathy for older users in undergraduate design students

Empathy has been recognised as a key skill by practicing designers. With rapid changes to inclusivity and accessibility in the transport sector, student designers need to appreciate and understand the way in which people of differing abilities are able to engage with and interact with transport. They need to not only develop an understanding of older and vulnerable users - how they experience products, vehicles, services and systems - but also have the confidence to try out new ways of finding information and gaining ‘authentic experiences’ to feed into their designs. Although empathic design is encouraged, there is often little opportunity for this to occur in a full educational curriculum.   To meet this need, the authors are developing a framework for teaching empathic design using low fidelity, experiential prototypes – using material that is easily available and affordable to design students. This paper reports the first steps towards designing a brief intervention to increase the empathic horizon of transport design students. It concludes with a set of guidelines on how to create high quality learning experiences for students that will enable enhanced empathic design outcomes as they embark upon design careers.&nbsp