Does design education always produce designers?

By questioning what we mean by the term ‘designer’ this paper describes the ideas behind a new Open University course in Design Thinking. The paper shows how the creative skills of students can be consciously developed, and deliberately applied outside of the creative industries in what are termed ‘embedded’ contexts. The distance learning model of education pioneered by The Open University is briefly sketched before the developments and ideas behind the new course in Design Thinking, in particular the concept of ‘social practice’ are explained in detail. The paper presents the results of an extensive student and tutor survey regarding the course before concluding that, although it is possible to teach design practice by distance, practice-based expertise for tutors remains a critical success factor

Normal creativity : What 1,038 t‐shirts can tell you about design education

The study of creativity in design has tended to emphasise its value, scarcity, and location in the individual designer rather than in choices made by a consuming public in the context of a wider culture. This paper, in presenting and developing a view of creativity in design as a normal concept, will present initial results from a study of 1038 student design assignments obtained from a distance-learning course in Design Thinking from The Open University in the UK. We show how ‘normal’ distributions of design outputs can be contived from a structured design process and argue that the creativity that is displayed is a natural result of the ‘grammar’ of that process, in a similar way to the syntax of a sentence allowing new combinations of words and meanings to be easily formed. Seen like this creativity is less of an individual ‘gift’, as some theories imply, but a common everyday response to open- ended problems

Which way is up? Space and place in virtual learning environments for design

The role of ‘place’ in design education is essential in providing a structured learning experience that can be trusted and which allows dynamic social connections to emerge in the development of reflective practice. With increasing demand for distance and online learning resources, this paper considers how such a sense of place can be arrived at using ‘virtual architecture’. Analogies with physical architectural space – for example ‘homes’, ‘forums’, ‘studios’, ‘libraries’ can be useful, but in many ways the opportunities for design learning in virtual architecture go far beyond what is possible with physical architecture. We describe how the virtual architecture of an Open University course in Design Thinking has consciously tried to create place rather than space, in crafting an environment with intrinsic learning opportunities, and the benefits this has brought to students studying the course

The effect of prototyping material on verbal and non-verbal behaviours in collaborative design tasks

This paper reports a study of 23 controlled experiments, with a total of 99 individual tasks, between pairs of designers collaborating to solve a simple design task using four different types of prototyping media. The aim of the study was to correlate verbal and non-verbal behaviours across different types of media with a range of measurement indicators. Using innovative movement trail images we show how collaborative sketching activity results in attenuated use of interpersonal collaborative space when compared with cardboard, clay, and Lego, which provoked intensive collaboration. Furthermore, the sketching (control) condition resulted in pre-conceived ideas being executed when compared with the three-dimensional media, where ideas emerged through collaboration. This finding suggests that increased creativity in design can result through the careful choice of prototyping media at the beginning of the design process

A Trade Restrictiveness Index of theLevel of Protection in Australian Manufacturing

In this paper we provide a new 31 year time series of the level of protection in the Australian Manufacturing Sector. The index used is the partial equilibrium form of the Trade Restrictiveness Index recently developed by the World Bank. This is the theoretically correct welfare-based average of levels of nominal protection provided to sub-industries. The paper outlines the index and its properties. The method of calculation uses series of the mean level of protection and its dispersion, which have been published by the Productivity Commission. Some comments are made on the insights gained from the new series

The development of responsibility in product designers

Investigations of ethics in product design have been limited. This paper offers an insight into designer's perceptions of responsibilities over three levels of expertise; first year design students, graduating design students, and design practitioners. The paper presents the use of some novel methods including triad and card sorting to uncover perceptions of designers responsibilities. The findings give rise to categories of development including knowledge development, ethical development, and role context development. The result is a descriptive model of the development of responsibility in product designers

Graduating product designers and their attitudes to design responsibility: A survey

The notion of responsibility in designing is one that is becoming increasingly important, underlying significant areas of design activity. The research reported in this paper presents the results of a questionnaire study of 50 graduating product designers from 11 UK Universities. We find that students are focussed on environmental issues, have a very clear idea about where their responsibilities end for the products they design, but who display significant differences between the ideas about responsibility they espouse and their practice

The Johnson Space Center Management Information Systems (JSCMIS): An interface for organizational databases

The Management Information and Decision Support Environment (MIDSE) is a research activity to build and test a prototype of a generic human interface on the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Information Network (CIN). The existing interfaces were developed specifically to support operations rather than the type of data which management could use. The diversity of the many interfaces and their relative difficulty discouraged occasional users from attempting to use them for their purposes. The MIDSE activity approached this problem by designing and building an interface to one JSC data base - the personnel statistics tables of the NASA Personnel and Payroll System (NPPS). The interface was designed against the following requirements: generic (use with any relational NOMAD data base); easy to learn (intuitive operations for new users); easy to use (efficient operations for experienced users); self-documenting (help facility which informs users about the data base structure as well as the operation of the interface); and low maintenance (easy configuration to new applications). A prototype interface entitled the JSC Management Information Systems (JSCMIS) was produced. It resides on CIN/PROFS and is available to JSC management who request it. The interface has passed management review and is ready for early use. Three kinds of data are now available: personnel statistics, personnel register, and plan/actual cost