Design Academics' Experiences Of Design Practice And Teaching

My thesis explores design academics’ qualitatively different experiences of design practice and teaching, and the relationship between the two. Past studies investigating the phenomenon of teaching have reported a hierarchy of conceptions of teaching ranging from categories where teachers focus on themselves and on conveying their knowledge, through to categories where teachers are student-centred and learning focussed. More recent research has suggested that the nature of the discipline may influence the teachers’ conceptions of teaching and several studies have found that, contrary to teachers from other disciplines, design teachers tended to be more student-focussed. I used a phenomenographic perspective and interviewed 10 design academics in a research-intensive university to capture their experiences of design practice and teaching. I found four categories of experience of design practice: design as a problem solving, outcome generating activity; design as an affective agent; design as a strategic act resulting in benefit to humanity; and design as an affective, socially embedded reciprocal domain. The current study is the only one known so far, to describe dimensions of design practice and how they are variously experienced across the categories. The four dimensions were: communication; research; creativity and ideation; and transformation. I also found four categories of design teaching: teaching as providing a pattern of practice; teaching as providing an environment enabling autonomous practice; teaching as causing a change in understanding; and teaching as enabling relational meaning making. Unlike other studies, the design academics in my study did not express more teacher-centred, knowledge conveying conceptions of teaching. The dimensions of the experiences of design teaching were: outcomes of the teaching learning process; the nature of taught knowledge; teachers’ perceptions of student teacher relationships and their roles; and assessment practices in the experience of design teaching. This last dimension appeared to a have a significant impact on the pedagogy of design teaching. My study also confirms that domain beliefs influence academics conceptions of teaching, their teaching practices and the ways in which they variously utilise the signature pedagogies of design. It is hoped that my study will be of benefit to both design practitioners and design teachers, and by providing a basis for dialogue, result in enabling designers and design teachers to understand/perceive the phenomena in new ways, perhaps resulting in richer and more sophisticated experiences. It is also hoped that my study will raise awareness in designer teachers, of the affective relationship between design and teaching beliefs, and of the ways in which design beliefs may impact on teaching practices