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

The Development of Home Economics in the Yoakum Colored School

This theme is an attempt to present the essential facts of the continuous growth of the Home Economics Department of the Yoakum Colored School at Yoakum, Texas, by pointing out in simple form a general record of the development from the early beginning to the present through progressive stages. The individual contributions as well as those made collectively warrant recognition as well as preservation. The data collected and presented here were gathered from school records. Annual Home Economic DATA PRESENTED reports made to State Supervisor of Home Economics, observations, and information from those teachers who were in a position to contribute. The order of presentation is as given in the table of contents. The purpose of this theme is to collect and assimilate information concerning the Home Economics PURPOSE Department at Yoakum, Texas, in order to inform those persons intimately concerned of Its immediate development

Making Government Secrecy and Countersubversion Safe for Democracy

Reviewing Alex Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion From World War I to the McCarthy Era (University of Illinois Press 2013); Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies (Stanford University Press 2013); and Rahul Sagar, Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton University Press 2013)

Making Government Secrecy and Countersubversion Safe for Democracy

Reviewing Alex Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion From World War I to the McCarthy Era (University of Illinois Press 2013); Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies (Stanford University Press 2013); and Rahul Sagar, Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton University Press 2013)

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