Design and Technology Education (LJMU)
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Cultural Memory, an Asset for Design-driven Innovation within the Creative Industries Sector: Lessons for design education
Get PDFCulture is gaining recognition globally as an important driver of sustainable development in the creative economy. The significance of the role of design and culture with the creative industries is under-researched, especially from the new emerging economies perspective. Therefore, designers need a framework which will guide them on how they can create sustainable, and innovative cultural sensitive products which reflect users’ identities. Co-designing from cultural memory is a new design approach which embeds users’ beliefs, expectations, and expressive values in products and services. The paper discusses two case studies which were conducted in Botswana within the creative industries. The aim was to study how designers imbued cultural memory factors into design features. The paper developed a culture-centred design model after carefully studying how designers identify, transform and imbued cultural memory factors into innovative glocalised products that have local meaning and a global appeal
Learning to Design Backwards: Examining a means to introduce human-centered design processes to teachers and students
Get PDF‘Designing backwards’ is presented here as a means to utilize human-centered processes in diverse educational settings to help teachers and students learn to formulate and operate design processes to achieve three sequential and interrelated goals. The first entails teaching them to effectively and empathetically identify, frame and analyze complex social, technological, economic, environmental orpublic policy problems, or problematic situations. The second involves helping them cultivate understandings from these problem - framing processes to iteratively develop and then assess the relative efficacies of specific prototypes or prototypical ideas that, if implemented, could improve some aspects of these situations on behalf of particular groups of stakeholders. In this context, ‘prototyping’ is defined as a heuristic process that allows students to test how operating various strategies and procedures, or deploying particular interventions in the forms of communication systems, affordances, and tools and toolkits, can yield insights about how to affect useful, constructive transformations. The third goal challenges students to correlate the knowledge they gleaned from engaging in the first two processes to work with given groups of stakeholders to develop and implement more relevant, effective and appropriate outcomes to the complex challenges that directly or indirectly affect specific aspects of their lives
The Threshold of Uncertainty in Teaching Design
Get PDFIn many of our universities and colleges there is a long established approach to teaching design through practice. For most students their end goal is to achieve a level of capability to function as designers in the professional world. Their education helps them construct a passport to enter this community of professional practice. Part of the legacy of the funding initiative in England to support research into teaching has been the development of a better understanding of a practice-based approach to design pedagogy. This was a principal focus in two centres funded by the initiative in which ‘signature pedagogies’ were identified as a distinguishing characteristic for developing student capability within various types of design practice, each of which contains those elements, which are characteristic of the discipline. This notion moves the emphasis away from the content of the curriculum and explores the importance of practical, embodied and experiential ways of knowing. Where these were investigated for product and automotive design the concept of transformative practice was identified as crucial. Designers typically employ two simultaneous interacting cognitive styles. From a five-year longitudinal study involving 89 design students, it became clear that in order to develop the confidence to match these two modes of thought, neophyte designers needed to surmount a barrier, or a threshold concept, which we labelled the toleration of design uncertainty. Accommodating effective arrangements to accomplish this has reinforced the importance of employing the traditional arrangement of studio teaching and given it a greater focus
Phenomenology for Introductory Architectural Analysis Courses: The pentagon methodological approach
Get PDFAs a consequence of fruitful discussions about joining theory and practice both in design research and educational design programmes, this article aims to explore phenomenological parameters in the framework of an exercise for Engineer-architecture students from the University of Leuven in Belgium. Relying upon the arguments of recognised architects regarding the importance of the phenomenological approach in the field of architecture, it is intended to propose a five-step method (pentagon) to add to architectural analytical exercises. The paper argues that an explicit phenomenological awareness within architectural design education should be addressed in addition to the potential references to architectural phenomenology in theoretical courses or in the discourse of architectural design teachers during the studio courses. This article begins this process through the discussion of one example: ‘Integrated Seminar on Housing’ which is taught in the first semester of the bachelor programme. A qualitative review of theoutcomes of the exercise stresses a positive effect in the development of students’ skills that are not an explicit focus of methodologies related to programmatic or technical skills. The conclusions encourage the development of the experimental study to improve the complementarity of the phenomenological approach with the more technical methodologies. In the final reflectionsabout the results of the pentagon methodological approach some evidence is provided in respect to the article’s claims
Tasks in Technology: An analysis of their purposes and effects
Get PDFIntroduction for the 2015 DATA Special Edition This paper was written in 1993 and was published in The International Journal of Technology and Design Education. 1994 Springer 4(3): 241-256. The paper concerns the nature of the tasks that initiate and drive technological activity. It is set in the context of two research projects that we conducted in TERU; the Assessment of Performance Unit project in Design & Technology (1985 to 1991) and the Economic and Social Research Council project “Understanding Technological Approaches” (UTA) (1992-1994). The former was a large scale national survey of performance in schools - involving tests on 10,000 learners in 700 schools, and the latter is a small scale study (80 learners in 20 schools) examining in detail the processes that learners engage in as they tackle technological tasks. However, the wider context of this paper concerns the English and Welsh National Curriculum (NC) implementation programme that had been launched in 1990. It caused a huge storm both in the curriculum generally and in design & technology (d&t) in particular. In the wider curriculum the assessment arrangements surrounding the Standard Assessment Tasks had been so badly designed that in 1992 teachers and schools had boycotted the whole process. And in d&t, the ‘Order’ that defined what teachers should do in the classroom/studio/workshop appeared to make very different demands on teachers than had previously been the case. The Order defined d&t in four ‘Attainment Targets’, the first of which (AT1) was ‘Identifying Needs and Opportunities’. This (at least) implied that learners themselves should be doing that ‘identifying’, and in 1990 that was far from common practice. At exactly this moment we undertook the ESRC: UTA project that enabled us to collect the data that would inform this issue. We followed in detail the tasks that teachers set or negotiated with learners and examined the consequences of these tasks on ’ subsequent actions
End-piece
Get PDFIntroduction for the 2015 DATA Special Edition The majority of this paper first appeared as the ‘concluding reflections’ that Kay and I put together for the 2007 Springer book in which we documented the research undertaken in TERU since 1985 (Kimbell & Stables [2007] ch 15 Researching Design Learning. Springer). The paper is based on a personal overview of our thoughts about the ‘so-what’ of our research. Was it all worth it? How is the world changed? For whom is life better? There are two additions to that 2007 material – and they both appear at the end of the piece. In the first ‘The final curtain’, we outline our reasons for calling time on TERU; announcing its formal closure. In the second ‘…or maybe not’ we suggest a new direction for research at Goldsmiths – building on the wider network of design researchers here who are principally engaged with the Design programmes
Researching performance based assessment: authenticity in assessment activities and processes to support the development of learner capabilities
Get PDFIntroduction for the 2015 DATA Special Edition This paper was originally presented as a Keynote address at the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education 21st International Conference, held at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, in January 2013. I was asked to present a Keynote that focused on assessment and, mindful of the conference theme of making Mathematics, Science and Technology Education socially and culturally relevant in Africa, the paper took the concept of authenticity as a major thread. The presentation drew on a number of TERU research projects, including one that Richard and I had conducted in South Africa in 1999. Using the projects as case studies, issues of authenticity were explored in relation to summative and formative assessment practices and related pedagogic approaches. Through an exploration using validity, reliability and manageability as lenses, the presentation offered some concluding comments on possible challenges and the potential of drawing on the research presented in a Southern African context. The paper here, that documents the keynote, has not previously been published
Technical Objects Between Categorisation and Learning: An exploratory case study in French middle school
Get PDFIn this article we present exploratory research carried out in order to understand how students (from 12 to 14 years old) relate to technical objects. It uses technical objects that are part of everyday life and mediated reality. A questionnaire was administered to 57 students in French classes. The questionnaire was composed of three parts: 1) the detection of technical characteristics of objects; 2) the ability to create relationships between objects; and 3) the direct use of technical objects and personal interest in sciences and technology. The results show the complexity of the relationship with technical objects and the need for an educational mediated intervention of design and technology educatio
Gender Differences in Technology Illuminated Through Test Performance (outcome) Data and ‘Realtime’, ‘On-task’ (process) Data
Get PDFIntroduction for the 2015 DATA Special Edition This paper was written in 1994 as an internal TERU paper – it has not previously been published. It draws from two research projects that gathered data on gender differences in performance in technology. As with the Tasks in Technology paper (also included in this Special Edition), the wider context was the early years of the National Curriculum and specifically concerning the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs). We were aware of the sensitivity of the gender data, essentially that girls seriously outperformed boys and the concomitant concern that the tests themselves might contain implicit bias, so we undertook a systematic review of the data from our two TERU projects that could inform the matter. The first provided ‘outcome’ data from APU tests (15 year olds in 1988 – Kimbell et. al., 1991). The latter, derived from the Understanding Technological Approaches (UTA) project (Kimbell et. al., 1994) allowed us to crosscheck these data with ‘process’ data derived from classroom observations (across all school years from 1-11 in 1992/3 -). I focus on two specific aspects of gender performance that were highlighted in test findings: • concerning ‘active’ and ‘reflective’ response modes to tasks; • concerning design proposals in relation to ‘users’ and for ‘manufacture’
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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)Access Repository Dashboard
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