Teaching Design: A Guide to Curriculum and Pedagogy for College Design Faculty and Teachers Who Use Design in Their Classrooms

by Meredith Davis

Today’s interest in design thinking by management and education has produced a number of efforts to describe the design process as a series of discrete steps that can be applied to any problem. The result is often preoccupation with executing steps in a particular order, rather than engaging with important aspects of the challenge and its context through activities and thinking that are especially appropriate to the task. Observation and research, for example, can be found throughout a design process; it is sometimes exploratory,

sometimes generative, and sometimes evaluative (Dubberly and Evenson, 2010). Visualization and modeling support consensus-building across many aspects of problem-solving, not just the “making” phase in a linear progression aimed at producing a physical artifact. Design process, therefore, is a multifaceted concept that often unfolds in ways that reflect the particular demands of a problem and its context.

(what they include or eliminate from the brief),

Design is never bias-free, and faculty impart values and perspectives throughout their interactions with students in the classroom.

More than other aspects of instruction, however, the design critique explicitly reinforces the values and priorities of faculty and the field.

“the purpose is not to learn from talk … but t...

Faculty can lecture on a range of theories and concepts, but if comments in critiques are inconsistent with lectures, students gravitate to the values expressed in the public evaluation of their work.

while signature pedagogies are good for developing complex patterns of disciplinary behavior, they are also “dangerous sources of rigidity”

that can encourage repetitiv...

Although the signature pedagogies of design education receive increasing attention from other fields as effective models for teaching and learning, they can be at odds with emerging paradigms in professional design practice.

The prevailing model in most communication design programs,

for example, is one that supports an art-based, artifact-oriented view of design, despite increasing percentages of professional work in large-scale problems that invo...

Very few communication design programs, for example, structure instruction around issues of behavior, user experience, and compl...

Instead, they begin studies with print-based, artifact-centered assignments in the arrangement of form and content and define coursework by what students mak...

Undergraduate design students are recipients rather than framers of investigations for most of their four years of design study,

An art-direction approach leads by faculty example and casts the teacher as an expert in the classroom.

Faculty who direct inexperienced designers in their professional offices are frequently most comfortable with this teaching style as a means for maintaining quality control.

In individual and group critiques, the art-directing faculty member makes explicit suggestions regarding how to improve work—for

“Create a stronger hierarchy among elements by making headline...

cases, faculty direct students toward particular solutions through patterns in the praise they gi...

Typically, faculty comments include a rationale for suggestions,

Art direction is an easy way to teach, and it usually yields strong formal results.

Faculty who art direct students frequently have the best-looking student work at the end of a semester.

The limitation of this approach, however, is that students may not recognize similar concepts in...

It is fairly common, therefore, to find that a consistently art-directed student has work that varies widely in quality under different faculty and from school to the workplace.

A second problem of art direction is that all student work in a class begins to exhibit common visual characteristics, because it doesn’t arise from individual student interpretations

direction—it may come from peer-to-peer learning or dominant forms in contemporary media—but

responses aren’t ameliorated by intervening opinions from another source.

comments made under an art-direction model for teaching and learning usually spring from a particular design ideology that is rarely reveale...

vague assumption of “unive...

design dispositions reside within a spectrum of possible theor...

Studies also show that students in higher education are generally unprepared for critical and creative thinking and that freshmen arrive at colleges overly confident in their own thinking skills. King and Kitchener report that first-year college students score relatively low on scales of reflective judgment and believe that “absolute truth is only temporarily inaccessible” (King & Kitchener, 1994, p. 224; NC State University, 2014).

Freshmen also believe that most problems are well structured and have a high degree of certainty embedded in their definition.

When confronted with situations that are ill resolved or uncertain, “they fall back on believing what they want to believe” rather than applying critical inquiry to gain greater clarity ...

engaging students in ambiguous problems from the very start of thei...

80 percent of college-bound seniors graduate from high schools with fewer than five hundred students but enter colleges with enrollments of ten thousand or more (Cuseo, 2007).

interactive learning

environments with high expectations

learn what it is to be a student, what is required to get by. If students are taught to be passive seekers and transcribers of information, that is what they become.

actively resisting our attempts in upper-division courses to get them to go beyond the information we give them” (Spear, 1984, pp. 6–7).

delivering some portion of a college education through practice-based instruction that encourages students’ ...

college professors were hired for their discipl...

many argue that there is simply too much disciplinary content to cover to add new competencies,

the development of students’ critical and creative thinking is less about what they teach than about how they teach.

As a result, most college faculty limit their teaching to the very kind of instruction (i.e. lectures) that res...

the development of students’ critical and creative...

The study is compelling evidence that faculty, when presented with concrete teaching strategies, can adapt design approaches to disciplinary content to achieve the higher-order thinking skills demanded by a knowledge economy.

Students arrive in college programs, unprepared for the critical and creative thinking necessary for high-wage employment in innovation jobs.

proponents of design-based instruction in the United States advocate using design as a delivery system for any content.