Learning-through-Touring: Mobilising Learners and Touring Technologies to Creatively Explore the Built Environment

Learning-through-Touring uncovers ways in which people interact with the built environment by exploring the spaces around, between and within buildings. The key idea embodied in the book is that learning through touring is haptic – the learner is a physical, cognitive and emotional participant in the process. It also develops the concept that tours, rather than being finished products, are designed to evolve through user participation and over time. Part One of the book presents a series of analytical investigations into theories and practices of learning and touring that have then been developed to produce a set of conceptual methods for tour design. Projects that have tried and tested these methods are described in Part Two. Technologies that have been utilised as portable tools for learning-through-touring are illustrated both through historical and contemporary practices. In all of this, there is an underlying belief that what is formally presented to us by ‘authorities’ is open to self-discovery, questioning and independent enquiry. The book is particularly relevant for those seeking innovative ways to explore and engage with the built environment; mobile learning educators; learning departments in museums, galleries and historic buildings; organisations involved in ‘bridging the gap’ between architecture and public understanding and anyone who enjoys finding out new things about their environment

Designing Participant-Generated Context into Guided Tours

This article presents an interdisciplinary framework for designing participant-generated context into guided tours. The framework has been developed in parallel to practice-led research in the design of mobile learning tours with young people based in London. The article draws on art, architecture and urbanism to outline productive concepts, ‘seeding’ and ‘threading’, which support mobilized learning in tours of the built environment. In this, context is explored as an active and dynamic idea in developing attributes of the mobilized learner in the design of tours around buildings and the built environment

Users as architects: thinking big/reading small

Using the realm of the city to explore new 'ways of seeing' the urban experience raises an important issue of not only who designs the city, but how it is interpreted by those who live in it. This need not be seen as a passive relationship where architects and planners make the big decisions and are therefore central in determining how the city is used. Far from it. This paper explores ways in which users are architects in shaping the future of London. In schools, design often centres on the hand-held product and from here, its associated meanings and values. (There is little reason to focus on the large scale in the D&T orders.) This paper seeks to evidence how a specific view of architecture offers students in Design and Technology opportunities to creatively explore a 'lived-in' relationship with architectural products that differs from analysing the use of smaller scale, everyday products. Research focuses on how theories concerned with analysis of human activity can frame development of 'reading' in design education. As such, this paper reflects part of a wider research brief on language and the culture of design in secondary schools. The city is not confined to the spatial scale of the building, or indeed that of the city itself, but encompasses the whole, multiscalar landscape produced by human activity: from the corporeal to the global, the worldly to the intimate. (Borden et al, 2001

Death of the designer

This paper describes a paradigm for critical observation (or watching skills) in design and technology. This kind of study benefits from an understanding of linguistic theories and interpretation of text – beyond structuralism and semiotics – that moves towards a consideration of the ‘other’ or ‘difference’ in textual analysis. It is this that is explored as a paradigm for developing critical thinking about buildings and the spaces between them in design and technology. ‘The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer … The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the ‘death of the author’ is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim.’ (Eagleton: 138) Augé’s concept of supermodernity (Augé, 1995), exposes the effect of information overload on our perceptions of space. ‘Solitary contractuality’ confines the user to what the designer wants them to do in a particular space – the designer is at the flight deck controlling uniform connections in a ‘non-place’. Moving away from solitary contractuality into socially organic observation of the built environment is the main theme of this paper – observing how users are productive making place

Located Lexicon: a project that explores how user generated content describes place

This extended conference paper explores the use and potential of location data in social media contexts. The research involved a series of experiments undertaken to assess the extent to which location information is present in exchanges, directly or indirectly. A prototype application was designed to exploit the insight obtained from the data-gathering experiments. This enabled us to develop a method and toolkit for searching, extracting and visualising mass-generated data for open source use. Ultimately, we were able to generate insights into data quality and ‘scale of query’ for emerging pedagogical research in learning swarms and distributed learners

Designers in Action: An evaluation of the impact of the Design Museum workshop series

Consistently over the last five years, Ofsted reports on schools' performance in design and technology have drawn attention to the weakness of teaching the processes of designing. The criticism is that this process is unimaginative, unduly regimented (being both linear and mechanistic), and unnecessarily embroidered (prettied-up) with irrelevant graphic embellishment simply to influence examiners. There is an extensive and ever expanding literature providing ample testament to this problem and it is regularly highlighted as an issue in annual design and technology Ofsted reports.'many still spend too much time on superfluous decoration of their design folders rather than on real design development.' (Ofsted 2002/a)The Design Museum decided to tackle this problem by initiating a series of'

Design as Transformative Educational Practice

This body of work grows from a Transnational Education (TNE) initiative working in partnership with Miriam College in the Republic of the Philippines (RP) and supported by the British Council. The work is very much practice-oriented, looking to explore the development of partnerships and networks that affect real change through designing education: combining our range of design methods and mindsets to enable different ways of tackling educational issues, opportunities, problems, infrastructures and systems by understanding the realities of interrelatedness between educational concepts, things and people. Through collaborative engagement with our colleagues in the Philippines and beyond, we have taken an iterative approach to developing our practice, so that it is informed by and, in turn, informs our theoretical perspectives. The methodological approach is a form of participant action research (PAR), working with colleagues in RP to develop, reflect on and model our range of designing education methods and mindsets. We are exploring how these can be used to revisit and reinvigorate pedagogical practice through engagement with diverse fields of enquiry such as social justice, the requirements of 21st century citizens and sustainable futures in international contexts. This work will be supported by a the award of Newton Institutional Links grant of £110K (Feb 2019 to Feb 2020)

Designing Education: Theorising a Critical-creative Practice

This body of work seeks to develop the theoretical underpinning of designing education as a critical creative practice. Bringing together a range of theoretical and practice-oriented concepts from pedagogy, design and design anthropology, this work seeks to outline our distinct approach to designing education as the fusion of a critical practice (of Design) with a critical pedagogy. The context of this work is to both ask questions of and offer theoretical constructs for developing philosophical platforms for creative learning that might situate, alter, question, or challenge knowledge about/within our designing education practice. Through collaborative engagement with our colleagues in the Philippines and beyond, we have taken an iterative approach to developing the theoretical perspectives that underpin our approach to designing education, so that they are informed by and, in turn, inform our designing education practice. The methodology for this body of work starts with a review of relevant literature to inform a conceptual start-point for participant action research (PAR). Then, as part of the PAR study, we work with colleagues in RP to explore how such theoretical underpinning supports a philosophical platform for praxis (reflection and action), rooted in and supported by diverse critical theoretical constructs that seek to empower both educators and learners. This work will be supported by the award of Newton Institutional Links grant of £110K (Feb 2019 to Feb 2020)

Questioning the design and technology paradigm

The pace of technological change means that the school subject of design and technology must be in the process of constantly reinventing itself. Yet the way that we are teaching has changed little since the beginnings of the subject. We are still delivering and assessing in the same ways we were 30 years ago. Why? The industries and philosophies which power our thinking have, and are, changing drastically. We would seem to be concerned to give citizens of tomorrow the new tools without the new ways of using them. Much vaunted issues like collaboration, creativity, sustainability and the reasons why we do what we do, are little questioned. The subject of design and technology would seem to be in a unique position to influence designers, consumers and citizens of the future. Ideas of learning and designing styles, choice and collaboration would seem to be the watchwords for the future. So how do we do it? As a group will share ideas and plans for ways of rethinking what we are about, therefore how we should enable the learners of the future and then how we should assess it. This will be a collaborative experiential session, which challenges the traditional perceptions of the keynote presentation and will be more theatrical than is conventionally done. The attatched paper is therefore a commentary to the presentations but will not be the text of the presentation. Those presentations will be members of the team giving the situation in role. There should be time within the questions session for idividuals in the audience who feel that we have polarised and misrepresented their positions to speak to the rest of the conference. In our abstract we hignlighted the areas of collaboration, creativity, sustainability and the philosophy of design and technology. The issues surrounding these missing links in our views were collaboration, creativity, sustainability, and philosophy