Cubic Journal
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Rising to the Challenge: Education, Pandemic and (Virtual) Skills Transfer
Get PDFWith the widening scope of design, the importance of the design studio has concomitantly responded by transforming its own character to become inclusive of the educational domains of history, professional practices, theories, technical, and material studies. The absorption of such domains, part-and-parcel of the studio setting, has irrevocably highlighted the importance of education within the container of the studio or rather ‘in-situ’ education. However, with the volatility of external factors, the challenges posed to design education are multiple. Especially in light of the rise of a global pandemic, educators globally have had to implement crisis strategies in response. This short visual essay outlines the obstacles of online teaching; moving from resistance to embracing the tools and features that online education provides. Sharing the gained experiences, starting at the rise of the pandemic, the text engages seven key points of interest, while practically demonstrating responses in the product design setting
Blended Learning Strategies for Advertising Design Studies
Get PDFTechnological developments have brought profound challenges to design education. To understand how design educators adapt to new technological directions, this article examines student feedback from advertising design courses that apply blended learning approaches. This study identified three blended learning strategies conducive to meaningful learning: timely and meaningful feedback; engagement with real world tasks; and support from expert tutors. This article also discusses potential resistance and challenges in implementing instruction in blended technological environments
Bringing Home Recursions: Co-Crafting Environmental Self-Implication in Adult Design Education
Get PDFThis report is about an explorative co-crafting course applying the notion of recursive publics to adult learning and pro-environmental activation, which aimed to engage a diverse cohort of learners towards patterns of eating, living, and engaging that promoted wellbeing and a healthy environment. This two-month-long, university-endorsed study in Hong Kong saw 22 participants fermenting their urine in which to grow an edible plant (Lactuca sativa), thereby creating a material relationship between their bodies and the environment. Technologies were employed to bring people physically together for greater emancipatory engagement inside the shared material condition. When analyzed, these technologies revealed their potential for opening or restricting the synergies from combined purpose, expertise, and immanent life processes in recursively profound and playful ways. This civic-tech study offers a recursive self-implication approach to design education as a collective negotiation process for navigating unknown territory to converge a myriad of expertise and intended beneficiaries
Studio In-Situ: From Disjuncture to Dislocation
Get PDFThis photo essay explores the possibility of radically shifting the understanding of the design studio as a spatial construct. By considering the seven-year evolution of a (socalled) design-build project known as the Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms, it recognises the possibility of dislocating the design studio from its traditionally centralised space in the academy and moving it to the site of its investigation or intervention for the duration of a project. The Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms aimed to improve water and sanitation infrastructure in a severely under-resourced informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, through the insertion of small permanent public spaces. Due to a number of reasons, including the physical characteristics of the sites selected for these spaces, the design studio gradually shifted its physical location to such an extent that virtually the entire design, documentation and construction process took place in-situ
The Role of Technology in Reforming Design Education: Pedagogy – Critique – Transformation
Get PDFDesign education has significantly changed since the 1950s. The era depended widely on normative models such as those proposed by Benjamin Bloom (Bloom et al. 1956) and his collaborators, which resulted in the formulation of Bloom's Taxonomy. Comprising six interchangeable layers (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) of higher and lower thinking, Bloom's taxonomy sets in place an archetypal model for education that thrives on object-driven goals. Here, pedagogical interchange and the object-driven and organised structure of education can adapt to each layer within the taxonomic structure
Gender in Design: An Overview
Get PDFThis issue of CUBIC Journal continues exploring what we find an extremely important and complex topic. We sought diverse contributions from a wide range of design sectors and aimed at presenting contributions that reposition design and design research through considering gender dynamics. And just like the conference, the journal issue call for papers was named to reflect how the smallest aspects in design have the greatest influence and are often side-lined by ignorance, oversight, or intention (‘The GREAT small’). We added three overlapping and often complimentary concepts to express our interest in the ‘Other’, i.e. the ‘Different’ and the ‘Willful’ (sic)
In Hand: Touch as a Critical Act in Creating and Experiencing the Built Environment
Get PDFThis photo essay depicts the design and fabrication research that David Schafer and his team conducted through a grant from the Association of Siamese Architects (Thailand). His architecture and design practice crafted bespoke objects which investigate the value that hands-on making gives to an intuitive and embodied design. Seeking intimate relationships with the hand, skin, eyes, and body both before, during, and after manifestation, this work describes a material practice intimately familiar with making’s feedback mechanisms and constituent benefits to the design studio. They study ergonomic relationships with familiar object typologies and segue into the creation of experientially sensitive door handles in wood, leather, steel, brass, and other materials. The palpable haptic richness of these objects, through a responsive and fertile design process, reveals opportunities amicably distant from standardised, functionalist design methods
Prototyping: The Dual Actions
Get PDFReflecting upon the constructionist model "learning-bymaking," prototyping (prototype making) as a product design and research approach is well recognised for assured development of innovative concepts in individual or collaborative working environments. A prototype is typically used as a tool to support experiments or interventions and to evaluate research goals. It also facilitates participatory design and user-centred design. However, it carries both coded and tacit knowledge that we, design educators and practitioners, find problematic to explain and instruct, particularly to non-designers. This paper amalgamates and argues the characteristics of prototyping including types, formats, and principles through literature review. Reflecting upon the designer’s intentions and the dual coding cognitive learning process, the author proposes a descriptive model that illustrates the dual actions experienced by the designer which can enable study on the improvement of the prototyping process
Design Making: The Values Had, The Object Made, The Value Had — Practice · Making · Praxis
Get PDFThis issue of Cubic Journal concerns making, and the value-structures connected to the premise, before and after execution. Fifteen authors and constituent research teams present their work in manifested design research here. In this work, physical, semi-physical, and transitionally physical embodiments of objects, spaces, and prototypical design conjectures are part and parcel of the researchers’ progress. Embodiment neither preempts, nor follows their work, but is essentially the substance of research itself within these manuscripts. The editors collected this work as status-taking for a broad range of creative and scholarly enterprises in several regions of the world. European, Southeast Asian, and American authors in architectural and product design fields provide perspectives on making-centric design research, across manual, digital, post-digital, and post-consumer spectra of fabrication. But as an assemblage, these works are more than a catalogue. They prompt retrospective thought on the values held, and the value given, by these authors’ conjectural experiments in material form
Additive Manufacturing Technologies in Restoration: An Innovative Workflow for Interventions on Cultural Heritage
Get PDFThe current advancement of this research within the construction sector is the missing link for bridging the gap between the digitisation of building processes and the fabrication of architectural components. Renewed market needs and contemporary design languages require increasingly in-depth digital proficiency for the management of representation and production. The primary challenge of turning digital data into matter in the building design field must be overcome in order to demonstrate a possible transfer of benefits for new constructions, or interventions on existing buildings. The scientific community unanimously states the importance of deepening the most updated digital fabrication systems. With the aim of elaborating a methodological approach that prevents the technique from prevailing over the cultural assets a project requires, the present study proposes an innovative workflow for restoration projects on culturally relevant architecture in a state of degradation