Envisioning Futures of Design Education: An Exploratory Workshop with Design Educator

The demand for innovation in the creative economy has seen the adoption and adaptation of design thinking and design methods into domains outside design, such as business management, education, healthcare, and engineering. Design thinking and methodologies are now considered useful for identifying, framing and solving complex, often wicked social, technological, economic and public policy problems. As the practice of design undergoes change, design education is also expected to adjust to prepare future designers to have dramatically different demands made upon their general abilities and bases of knowledge than have design career paths from years past. Future designers will have to develop skills and be able to construct and utilize knowledge that allows them to make meaningful contributions to collaborative efforts involving experts from disciplines outside design. Exactly how future designers should be prepared to do this has sparked a good deal of conjecture and debate in the professional and academic design communities. This report proposes that the process of creating future scenarios that more broadly explore and expand the role, or roles, for design and designers in the world’s increasingly interwoven and interdependent societies can help uncover core needs and envision framework(s) for design education. This approach informed the creation of a workshop held at the Design Research Society conference in Brighton, UK in June of 2016, where six design educators shared four future scenarios that served as catalysts for conversations about the future of design education. Each scenario presented a specific future design education context. One scenario described the progression of design education as a core component of K-12 curricula; another scenario situated design at the core of a network of globally-linked local Universities; the third scenario highlighted the expanding role of designers over time; and the final scenario described a distance design education context that made learning relevant and “close” to an individual learner’s areas of interest. Forty participants in teams of up to six were asked to collaboratively visualize a possible future vision of design education based on one of these four scenarios and supported by a toolkit consisting of a set of trigger cards (with images and text), along with markers, glue and flipcharts. The collaborative visions that were jointly created as posters using the toolkit and then presented by the teams to all the workshop participants and facilitators are offered here as a case study. Although inspired by different scenarios, their collectively envisioned futures of what design education should facilitate displayed some key similarities. Some of those were: Future design education curricula will focus on developing collaborative approaches within which faculty and students are co-learners; These curricula will bring together ways of learning and knowing that stem from multiple disciplines; and Learning in and about the natural environment will be a key goal (the specifics of how that would be accomplished were not elaborated upon.) In addition, the need for transdisciplinarity was expressed across the collaborative visions created by each of the teams, but the manner that participants chose to express their ideas about this varied. Some envisioned that design would evolve by drawing on other disciplinary knowledge, and others envisioned that design would gradually integrate with other disciplines

Giving voice to equitable collaboration in participatory design

An AHRC funded research project titled Experimenting with the Co-experience Environment (June 2005 – June 2006) culminated in a physical environment designed in resonance with a small group of participants. The participants emerged from different disciplines coming together as a group to share their expertise and contribute their knowledge to design. They engaged in storytelling, individual and co-thinking, creating and co-creating, sharing ideas that did not require justification, proposed designs even though most were not designers …and played. The research questioned how a physical environment designed specifically for co-experiencing might contribute to new knowledge in design? Through play and by working in action together the participants demonstrated the potential of a physical co-experience environment to function as a scaffold for inter-disciplinary design thinking,saying, doing and making (Ivey & Sanders 2006). Ultimately the research questioned how this outcome might influence our approach to engaging participants in design research and experimentation

Guidelines Towards Better Participation of Older Adults in Software Development Processes using a new SPIRAL Method and Participatory Approach

This paper presents a new method of engaging older participants in the process of application and IT solutions development for older adults for emerging IT and tech startups. A new method called SPIRAL (Support for Participant Involvement in Rapid and Agile software development Labs) is proposed which adds both sustainability and flexibility to the development process with older adults. This method is based on the participatory approach and user empowerment of older adults with the aid of a bootstrapped Living Lab concept and it goes beyond well established user-centered and empathic design. SPIRAL provides strategies for direct involvement of older participants in the software development processes from the very early stage to support the agile approach with rapid prototyping, in particular in new and emerging startup environments with limited capabilities, including time, team and resources

Exploring, Interpreting, and Applying Emotion-Driven Design in Brand Identity Development: A Design Student Case Study

This paper is a descriptive and qualitative case study of the emotional brand identity design process of an educational experience. The main goal concerns the exploration of methods, techniques, and approaches that visual communication design students use to interpret and apply emotion-driven design to two client-sponsored brand identity development projects—Center for Automotive Research and The Supreme Court of the Ohio. The participants in this study include twenty senior level students of a design program at a major university, the general public, the prospective users, and representatives from the client organizations. This study examines the design and application of a range of tools and methods for expressing, capturing, and applying emotion-driven experience to a brand identity development process from the design students’ perspectives during a 10-week academic quarter. In this case study, the emotional branding course outline utilized visual communication design problem-solving processes defined by four key design phases: Discovery Research, Design Definition, Design Concept, and Design Demonstration/Expression. The researchers of this study formulated a framework for the presentation of the various emotion-driven design tools based on adaptations of a reliable body of knowledge of pertinent literature. This study identifies emotion-driven design issues of concern to the participants and discusses the influences of these concerns on the design development of the selected projects

Human-centred Design Workshops in Collaborative Strategic Design Projects: An educational and professional comparison

It has been found that the implementation of Human-centred Design (HCD) methods in the Fuzzy Front-End is not likely to lead to diversification in educational product planning exercises, where time lines are short and executors lack experience. Companies, interested to collaborate with Master-level Industrial Design students on strategic design projects, should have realistic ambitions with respect to innovation and value creation. Moreover, diversification is not the only generic growth strategy to gain competitive advantage. Value can also be created from developing new products for existing markets, or creating new markets for existing products. On the contrary, companies who aim for diversification in their generic growth strategies, may not always end up with a complementary ‘high valued’ design outcome. From a learning perspective, the understanding of HCD methods created awareness among students and companies that respect and empathy for the end-user are important for enriching their design processes, and as such increasing the chances for diversification in subsequent projects with clients. This study also compares the implementation of Human-Centred Design (HCD) methods in a professional /collaborative and an educational/collaborative strategic design project

Co-Designing Participatory Approaches for Communities: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

This report is focused on the main outputs of a co-design and generative tools workshop with partners and key players from the Making Sense communities, in which the main results were targeted for use “on the ground” with collective ownership by those who would benefit the most from them. It is an enriched textual and visual summary of the workshop, its methods and main exercises, aiming at producing flexible and encompassing participatory framework for urban citizen sensing. The document is structured as follows: Section 1) Co-Creation and Participation in Community Engagement describes the main purposes, key activities and outcomes of the co-design and generative tools workshop; Section 2) Open Shared Framework to Build and Sustain Communities describes the framework that emerged in the final session of the workshop, while also drawing from presentations and exchanges that took place throughout the two days; Section 3) Proposing a Minimally Viable Open Manifesto for Making Sense puts forward a set of principles or guidelines as recommendations for conducting a participatory approach within community engagement contexts for collective environmental monitoring.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Co-Designing with Communities

Co-design refers to the collective creativity of designers and people not trained in design working together in the design development process (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). The co-design process recognizes that when it comes to issues of health, wellness, and community, the people involved as patients, family, caregivers and health care providers are the experts of their own experiences. Their expertise can provide invaluable firsthand insights about and ideas regarding wicked problems.The co-design approach has proven to help identify and shape innovative solutions as well as empower stakeholders to participate in the solutions that would directly impact them (Sanders & Stappers, 2012). We will present three case studies wherein the co-design approach has been used to tackle complex problems in health care connected to aging, autism and diabetes. Aging: This Co-Design Studio, led by Professor Sanders, provided an interdisciplinary mix of graduate students the opportunity to co-design with the residents at the Westminster-Thurber retirement community. The co-design teams explored a wide range of issues such as decisions about retirement living, clothing and finding the right footwear, and how to start the conversation about giving up driving. Autism: In her Design MFA thesis, Erika Braun investigated a co-design approach for tackling the wicked problem of transitions for adolescents with autism through an exploratory autism case study. She convened a diverse group of stakeholders, including adults with autism, as co-designers in an iterative process to frame the transition problem and explore new resolutions for the Center for Autism Services and Transition (C.A.S.T.), a clinic for adults with autism connected to OSUWMC. This exploration has led to an ongoing funded project focused on developing a better transitional care experience for patients with autism and their caregivers. Diabetes: This Co-Design Studio led by Professor Sanders facilitated the collaboration between multidisciplinary graduate student teams, patients and health care professionals to identify problems and challenges facing those living with Type 1 diabetes. The graduate students invited patients, their families, doctors, nurses, diabetes educators, and medical device company representatives to co-design solutions for issues at multiple levels of the current health care system. Intended audience: This presentation is beneficial to anyone who is interested in bettering health care experiences. Expertise of presenter(s): Elizabeth (Liz) Sanders is an associate professor in the Department of Design. Her academic research focuses on co-design for innovation and transdisciplinary collaboration. Erika Braun is a design researcher and product designer. She is collaborating on two autism projects and a solar light project for third world countries. Sapna Singh is a design researcher, strategist and educator. She teaches courses in design thinking, human factors and design history.AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University, [email protected] (Corresponding Author); Sapna Singh, Lecturer, Design Researcher Strategist, The Ohio State University; Erika Braun, Design Researcher, Product Designer, Collective Design Initiative.The presenters will share how the practice of co-design has empowered community members to become involved in the creation and development of innovative concepts and solutions for complex challenges that their communities face. The presentation will include case studies in which the co-design approach has been used to tackle complex problems in health care connected to aging, autism and diabetes