Natalía Papadopoúlou’s Reviews > Teaching Design: A Guide to Curriculum and Pedagogy for College Design Faculty and Teachers Who Use Design in Their Classrooms > Status Update

Research suggests delivering some portion of a college education through practice-based instruction that encourages students’ critical and creative thinking, regardless of their disciplinary major. The problem, however, is that most college professors were hired for their disciplinary expertise, not for their teaching skills.

Ask any two designers to define design and you’re likely to get very different answers. For some it is a noun that describes the expressive and functional attributes of artifacts and environments crafted through professional expertise. For others, it is a verb that refers to problem-solving activities such as planning and prototyping. And for others is a discipline or domain with its own ways of knowing and doing

Work is often late because faculty did not account for students’ failures, flagging self-confidence, or reflection in their pacing of interim project deadlines. Students successfully hide when they are lost in solving a problem, and their confusion becomes apparent in the final critique. It is the role of faculty to model a reflective practice in pacing the work of a studio and to coordinate conflicting demands.

Very few communication design programs, for example, structure instruction around issues of behavior, user experience, and complex technological and social systems. Instead, they begin studies with print-based, artifact-centered assignments in the arrangement of form and content and define coursework by what students make, rather than by the nature of the problem.

Two of the most frequent complaints by students in their evaluations of instruction are that the purpose of an assignment was never apparent or that expectations of their performance shifted across the duration of the project.

While graduate students tend to select institutions for access to particular faculty or perspectives on design study, undergraduates choose schools for a wider variety of reasons, including location or preparation for a specific kind of work.

The content of an educational experience needs to ensure that students grasp the concepts at the heart of the discipline and the overarching content of a strong general education in order to make sense of more profound changes in the culture at large.

Rittel argued that, “The designer complements the work of the engineer, architect, or scientist … and also controls an important area of no-man’s-land between all these specialties” (Lindinger, 1991, p. 94).

After the chaos of World War II, a small group of designers in Germany longed for an education that addressed the contribution of design to rebuilding a productive and socially responsible nation.

The history of design practice, therefore, is one of transition from trades to professions; from purely instrumental know-how gained through employment to academic preparation that includes study of the discipline as well as the practice—that is, the theories, perspectives, and discourse that underpin professional decision-making.