Design and Technology Education (LJMU)
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Critical Design in Universal Design Settings: Pedagogy turned upside down
Get PDFUniversal design thinkers are needed now more than ever. The world is facing one humanitarian crisis after the other, forcing people to flee their homes and resettle elsewhere without knowing anything about the local language, traditions, and way of life. Moreover, an ageing population is in need of (housing) design that facilitates long-term accessibility and hence homeowners ‘ageing in place’ safely without losing their independence. Moreover, nations such as Japan, Spain, and Norway have made diversity and inclusion part of their national political agendas to ensure that future products, buildings, and exterior spaces, are inherently accessible to all. Taking all of this together, it is imperative that the next generation of designers is informed about and skilled at dealing with future challenges and demands, however complex they might be.Originally developed as a powerful tool for designers, architects, and others to explore ‘extreme environments’, such as hospitals and prisons, and the ways in which objects impinge on existential wellbeing, the critical design method is now gradually being adapted and applied to the field of universal design. Two series of workshops have been conducted to test and further develop this way of thinking about design for educational contexts. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of applying the critical design method to various universal design contexts, and to discuss the results thus far. Furthermore, the paper examines to what extent critical design is an appropriate method for questioning and improving the field of universal design
Design from Discard: A method to reduce uncertainty in upcycling practice
Get PDFUpcycling is a suitable option for municipal solid waste recovery, especially, in the unorganized waste management scenario(s), where conventional waste recovery options are not efficient. Unlike standardized industrial manufacturing, upcycling is highly dependent on the quantity and quality of discards, and the involved stakeholders. Novel designs are required to suit varying considerations of every new upcycling set-up, and practitioners face uncertainty to parallel handle the variety and develop a design solution. A very few available design education based methods involve and guide design practitioners to handle the challenges in their case-based upcycling practice. However, these research studies are the first attempts to practice upcycling in an academic environment, and the results were limited to concepts and prototypes. This work categorically identifies the vital requirements regarding discard and stakeholders, discuss the theoretical foundation to handle the variety, and develop a practice-based design education method for upcycling practice. We propose a method - Design from Discard, to facilitate the participants to study the characteristics of discards, conceptualize a design as per the identified stakeholder(s), and accordingly develop upcycled designs. The method is explaining with an illustrative case where the design practitioner(s) conceive a new design from contextually discarded metalized film packaging. Finally, findings and research directions are addressed to bring new insights to the effective application of the proposed method as per diverse upcycling requirements
Rescued by Design: Enabling low-resource communities to reduce global drowning
Get PDFIn recent years Bournemouth University (BU) has witnessed a growth in undergraduate projects aimed at resolving problems in low-resource communities, with an emphasis on sustainability through the use of locally-available resources and production methods. BU academics have also been involved in helping the Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) to develop product solutions to help prevent global drowning, with an initial focus on the Bangladeshi context. Alongside the potential to enrich or even save lives in the target communities, such projects can offer considerable benefits to a range of domestic stakeholders: from the students and staff themselves to local businesses and non-government organisations (NGO’s). But they can also offer considerable challenges - educationally, ethically and practically – including issues with design validation, the reliability and availability of information, and the barriers of differing cultures and languages.How can educators support low-resource projects successfully? Can students truly gain sufficient understanding of all the relevant issues to design products for an unfamiliar culture, no matter how diverse? And why are low-resource communities looking to designers from the other side of the world to provide low-tech solutions to local problems?Bournemouth University’s low-resource projects have achieved varying degrees of success. By examining some of these - including the RNLI’s Bottle Buoy, which has recently gained international acclaim - the authors explore the complex issues relating to the use of such projects in an educational context, and present a proposal for future success using jugaad strategies and greater collaboration
Reflecting on the architecture curriculum through a survey on career switching
Get PDFDue to the deteriorating investment environment, many real-estate companies in China have started transferring their business out of the construction industry. This leads to the shrinkage of the design market and also architects’ salary. A great number of architects have switched career to maintain the same living quality as before. Meanwhile, architectural education in China is not able to integrate itself with emerging science and technologies, losing possibilities to explore new employment channels for its graduates. There is a huge gap between qualities needed in the current or future labour market and the architectural education in schools. An online survey was conducted to investigate the current state of architects’ career shifting, trying to expose the problem mentioned above. In the second part of this paper, education missions from 50 universities are analysed and detailed education curriculums from three top universities are scrutinised. At the end, the education boundary is suggested to be reconstructed from three aspects: integrating the emerging technologies; reducing unnecessary content; and training in self-learning skills
Design thinking, the value of collaboration, the importance of context … serendipity in research threads
Get PDFPeer Collaboration of Six-year olds when Undertaking a Design Task
Get PDFThe purpose of this study was to explore six-year-old Finnish preschoolers’ collaboration during a designing session, where they received a task to collaboratively design and sketch forest animals’ nests. Peer interaction is a natural part of craft, design and technology education because the learning situation itself provides various possibilities for collaboration.Craft making is traditionally seen as an individual execution, where makers are producing their own craft products instead of collaboration and shared outcomes. During this intervention, an experience of a shared designing and making situation was provided for children. The article focuses particularly on children’s verbal and embodied interactions, as well as children’s social roles in their groups, depending on their ability to use language during the designing process. Children’s activities were examined within Vygotsky’s sociocultural framework for learning and classified using a micro-level analysis methodology for tracking children’s collaboration and meaning making in designing. The results showed that six-yearold pre-schoolers succeeded in working collaboratively and they managed to solve the designing task with their peers, but embodied expressions also played a notable role in designing. Four types of roles, which children had in their peer groups, were found
Industrial Design Education as Innovation Broker through Making, Pivot Thinking, Autopoiesis and Expansive Learning
Get PDFThis article elaborates on design research in a final capstone industrial design studio unit and on the application of outcomes over eight years within a School of Engineering and its recent incarnation as School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics. Research and curriculum innovation linked students to the new global design-driven innovation agenda as knowledge workers leading by creativity and intellectual capital. An international design studio project with a professional design agency style was embedded in the first instalment of the research. Students worked as junior designers with industry experts who couched them with a work integrated learning approach. A second instalment expanded to learning concurrent and agile development. An open program recognised students’ backgrounds and experiences to create a community of learning curriculum through critical making, pivot thinking, autopoiesis and expansive learning. These contributed to also establish CDIO (conceiving, designing, implementing, operating) and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) initiatives as ways to procure evidence and facilitate production. Technology effects on design knowledge flows were addressed with participatory action research, information and communication technologies, human-computer interaction, e-manufacturing, fabrication and rapid prototyping tools. Findings indicated the need to update design education to achieve modern design artefact and knowledge construction. The greatest challenge was behavioural rather than technological. Institutional preconditioning assumed students as consumers and education as transmission skill transfer. A shift to transformative learning was possible by empowering participants to work within modern industry integrated benchmarks and achieve unique value propositions and minimum viable products that were ready to market outcomes
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Design and Technology Education (LJMU)BLResearchDay (LJMU)Journal of Living Labs (LJMU)Journal of Natural Products Discovery (L...Journal of Social Media for Learning (LJ...Student Law Journal (LJMU)PRISM (LJMU)Public Health Institute Journal (LJMU)SPARK (LJMU)Student Experience Proceedings (LJMU)Transformation in Education (LJMU)Innovations in Practice (LJMU)Links to Health and Social Care (LJMU)
Design and Technology Education (LJMU)BLResearchDay (LJMU)Journal of Living Labs (LJMU)Journal of Natural Products Discovery (L...Journal of Social Media for Learning (LJ...Student Law Journal (LJMU)PRISM (LJMU)Public Health Institute Journal (LJMU)SPARK (LJMU)Student Experience Proceedings (LJMU)Transformation in Education (LJMU)Innovations in Practice (LJMU)Links to Health and Social Care (LJMU)Access Repository Dashboard
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