HOW DESIGN IS TAUGHT? A SURVEY OF APPROACHES, MODELS & METHODS
Year: 2015
Editor: Guy Bingham, Darren Southee, John McCardle, Ahmed Kovacevic, Erik Bohemia, Brian Parkinson
Author: Maya, Jorge; Gómez, Elena
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Universidad EAFIT Medellín, Colombia
Section: Design Methods
Page(s): 612-617
ISBN: 978-1-904670-62-9
Abstract
How to teach design? This is not the first time that this question is asked and there are probably as
many answers as design academic programs in the world. Knowing how to design is not enough to
teach someone to do it. There are numerous experiences in this matter profusely published on
literature. However, this information is sparse and does not exist in a summarized and comparative
way, and knowing how design is taught is crucial to build other design academic programs in the
future and enrich the pedagogical practices of the existing ones. Every design program should be
based in a conceptual framework in which there are mainly two multidisciplinary fields: design and
education. This framework provides a structured and concrete way of improving learning activities in
design. In this paper, we will focus on design education identifying, summarizing and comparing its
pedagogical practices (PP’s) published in this matter. The first objective is accomplished with a survey
of approaches, models and methods of teaching design (PW’s), made from 204 publications not only
in product design but in architecture, arts and other disciplines. A comparative table shows the name
of the PP’s, its conceptual foundations, the use of technology, role of the teacher and disciplinary
origin. The second objective identified the elements in design education context to be able to describe
relationships between them in the form of a pedagogical model to build in a future project.
Keywords: Pedagogical practices (PP’s), teaching design, pedagogic methods, pedagogic approaches, pedagogic models, contextual elements of how design is taught