Design and Technology Education (LJMU)
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Factors That Shape Design Thinking
A wide range of design literature discusses the role of the studio and its related pedagogy in the development of design thinking. Scholars in a variety of design disciplines pose a number of factors that potentially affect this development process, but a full understanding of these factors as experienced from a critical pedagogy or student perspective is lacking. In this study, the experiences of six first-year design students were examined as they evolved in their conceptions of design. Data was collected during a series of three interviews. Analysis of data confirmed and recontextualized factors identified in the literature. Additional factors relating to group work, culture shock, critique, individual versus group identity, and the design influence of professors, mentors, and curricula are identified and reported. Opportunities for future research are identified
Project-Based Learning: An Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Approach
Reconstructing the Pupils Attitude Towards Technology-survey
In knowledge based economies technological literacy is gaining interest. Technological literacy correlates with attitude towards technology. When measuring technological literacy as an outcome of education, the attitudinal dimension has to be taken into account. This requires a valid, reliable instrument that should be as concise as possible, in order to use it in correlation with other instruments. The PATT instrument as developed in the nineties is an extensive survey that hasn’t been revalidated over the last three decades. The Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology (PATT) instrument was reconstructed and revalidated. The validation study was done in two major steps. First a pilot study with 250 students, followed by a main study with 3000 students. Different factors of the instrument were analysed on their internal consistency. Also the goodness of fit indices of the complete model were checked in a confirmatory factor analysis. This resulted in an instrument with six subfactors and 24 items of attitude towards technology. The six factors are Career Aspirations, Interest in Technology, Tediousness of Technology, Positive Perception of Effects of Technology, Perception of Difficulty and Perception of Technology as a Subject for Boys or for Boys and Girls. The instrument is easy to use, reliable and validated. It opens a door to further research and evaluation of technology education
Human-centred Design Workshops in Collaborative Strategic Design Projects: An educational and professional comparison
It has been found that the implementation of Humancentred Design (HCD) methods in the Fuzzy Front-End is not likely to lead to diversification in educational product planning exercises, where time lines are short and executors lack experience. Companies, interested to collaborate with Master-level Industrial Design students on strategic design projects, should have realistic ambitions with respect to innovation and value creation. Moreover, diversification is not the only generic growth strategy to gain competitive advantage. Value can also be created from developing new products for existing markets, or creating new markets for existing products. On the contrary, companies who aim for diversification in their generic growth strategies, may not always end up with a complementary ‘high valued’ design outcome. From a learning perspective, the understanding of HCD methods created awareness among students and companies that respect and empathy for the end-user are important for enriching their design processes, and as such increasing the chances for diversification in subsequent projects with clients. This study also compares the implementation of Human-Centred Design (HCD) methods in a professional /collaborative and an educational/collaborative strategic design project
Authentic Learning: The gift project
Higher Education is experiencing an increasingly diverse student population. Students bring a range of skills and experiences to their courses; they have different backgrounds and different needs. This fluidity requires an approach to teaching that encompasses the social aspects of learning. It has been suggested that authentic approaches to teaching and learning can assist in offering a perspective on learning which views learning as ‘enabling participation in knowing’. We propose that the authentic learning practices developed in The Gift design project, discussed in this paper, constituted approaches which acknowledged that students’ interests and experience are intrinsically bound up with motivation and engagement and, as such, have a major influence on the ways in which learning is constituted and developed. The Gift project has developed a range of innovative formative strategies which have provided both students and tutors with opportunities to become involved in peer assessment and review, peer feedback and reflection on learning outcomes. This re-conceptualisation of the assessment process has provided valuable insights into the development of learning skills such as problem solving, critical analysis, and the development of creativity and learner autonomy
Designing Relations in the Studio: Ambiguity and uncertainty in one to one exchanges
At the heart of learning and teaching in studio based design subjects lies the engagement by students and tutors in activities which are based on practical work simulating design professionals’ work. We report here on a research project which explored the student/tutor relationship in design pedagogies across a range of academic levels and subjects in one institution. Although a small sample of interviews was obtained, severn students and severn academics, the data is a rich account of relationships which support or restrict student learning. We consider that the relationships, which are mutable, often ambiguous and uncertain in character, are part of enacted roles structured by the university, the design practice and individual dispositions. These are further complicated by socio-cultural, political and spatial factors. In the most positive learning engagements students and tutors are working towards a two-way exchange on an equal level, which enables students to achieve their best and to become independent practitioners in their own right
Using Stop Motion Animation to Sketch in Architecture: A practical approach
Widely acknowledged as an archetypal design activity, sketching is typically carried out using little more than pen and paper. Today’s designed artifacts however, are often given qualities that are hard to capture with traditional means of sketching. While pen and paper sketching catches the character of a building, it may not equally well capture how that building changes with the seasons, how people pass through it, how the light moves in between its rooms from sunrise to dawn, and how its façade subtly decays over centuries. Yet, it is often exactly these dynamic and interactive aspects that are emphasised in contemporary design work. So is there a way for designers to be able to sketch also these dynamic processes?
Over several years and in different design disciplines, we have been exploring the potential of stop motion animation (SMA) to serve this purpose. SMA is a basic form of animation typically applied to make physical objects appear to be alive. The animator moves objects in small increments between individually photographed frames. When the photographs are combined and played back in continuous sequence, the illusion of movement is created. Although SMA has a long history in filmmaking, the animation technique has received scarce attention in most design fields including product design, architecture, and interaction design. This paper brings SMA into the area of sketching in architecture by reporting on the planning, conduct, result, and evaluation of a workshop course carried out with a group of 50 students at Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University, Swede