Conference Agenda

Designers are now entrusted with increasingly complex challenges and the stakes have never been higher. The complex and impactful endeavours of modern design reach far beyond the commercial and technical constraints and rewards systems experienced by previous generations; now designers are expected to shoulder the burden of global challenges (e.g. the SDGs), to deal with complex human behaviours and societal concerns, plus the impact of the Anthropocene crisis, whilst navigating (and advocating for) new technologies and the erosion of traditional fields of practice. A model of practice where designers are shapers of society, activists and agents for change, rather than service providers.

Contemporary design practice is moving from a model where the designer is at the subjective centre of design decision making, involved primarily in artifact creation, to that where the designer is both an activist and facilitator contributing critical know-how to the design of socio-technical systems. Despite the popularity of television shows that frame design as an aesthetic practice, design is no longer simply about ‘making things pretty’ or ‘making it work better’, cheaper to make, nicer to use, or more desirable, although there is still gainful employment in those missions.

And the role is not of problem solver, nor responder to a client brief, instead designers are now required to work in an ambiguous pre-brief environment, where rather than problem solving, or at a higher level, problem framing, the designer is involved (and/or leading) problem identification. This requires competency in systems thinking, a well-established understanding of human behaviours and societal and cultural customs, and a design methodology that employs high level critical awareness and thinking, in addition to more traditional creativity and skills-based acumen. Our graduates need to understand systems, not just users and manufacturing.

Designers are challenged to deal with socio-technical ‘wicked problems’ that introduce a new level of difficulty and complexity, requiring adaptability to transition across traditional practice boundaries with new interdependencies and interactions. Does the current model of design education adequately prepare graduates for the complexities of future practice, and do we need to transform design education in order to meet the needs of a contemporary world in crisis?

Does an over-reliance on traditional skills and artifact production, with striking graduate exhibitions, work to the detriment of graduates and the profession, masking the urgent need for a comprehensive review of what, and how we teach design? Are we utilising design projects can build cognitive and intellectual abilities, instead of artifacts or services? Should we be focussing more on a non-outcomes based approach to design education? Does the curriculum create opportunities for Epistemic Freedom or does the Eurocentricity of design education continue to be limiting and inhibiting (impacting diversity), and self-perpetuating?

This paper examines design education and aims to provide a critical provocation of the curriculum, seeking to understand the constantly evolving paradigm of design practice to identify both the required graduate attributes and models of curricula and pedagogy that ensure that graduates are prepared and armed with the appropriate skillset for future global practice.

There is a growing interest in the discipline of design sketching and drawing. Whereas its origin lies in the sketching and presenting of tangible (industrially designed) products, the discipline has, since approximately 2010, extended in various ways, along various dimensions. Various authors have addressed and discussed the most prominent change within the discipline since: the addition of so-called ‘story telling visuals’: sketches of processes, overviews, systems and e.g. journeys (Corremans and Mulder-Nijkamp 2019, Hoftijzer, Sypesteyn et al. 2020), also named ‘visual thinking’.

In fact, sketching as a means of communication has grown across discipline borders, and, consequently, the activity of sketching for communication enjoys a growing group of actors and audience these days.

The authors, being sketching practitioners and teachers, have been developing sketching course content aligned to this, both for the extending discipline (Bachelor and Master courses) of sketching within Industrial Design and for new audiences.

One particular course, a so-called ‘Master Class’, which is an intensive two-day taking course to an external audience, focused on ‘how to sketch visual stories’, was subject to an experiment. Firstly, the course was designed according to specific requirements (audience, goals, pedagogy) and to previous insights of course development and evaluation, of workshops offered, and according to previously described vision and methodology that concerns the alignment between sketches of tangible things and sketches of abstract concepts (Hoftijzer, Sypesteyn et al. 2020). Secondly, in order to assess the logic and quality of the short course’s structure and contents, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire.

Together, this experimental set-up, the questionnaire results, and the sketched output of the Master Class have led to new insights, to new knowledge that will help improve the pedagogic approach of many of the current courses taught and to the follow up Master Class in particular.

The internet of things (IoT) is growing rapidly as a technological tool and solution to various problems. Developing Internet of Things (IoT) technology also generates new opportunities for smart home products, services and systems (SH-PSS). Previous research has shown how challenging it is for designers to generate ideas for such smart product-service systems. Tiles IoT Inventor is a card-based toolkit that helps identify and learn the consumer's problems and explore the design brief's technical capabilities while ideating SH-PSS. We do this through the IoT Ideation toolkit comprising many domain-specific cards. The toolkit, consisting of a deck of cards such as scenario, persona, missions, things, human actions, sensors, services, feedback and reflection criteria, was created and assessed by user experience designers, product designers, and human-computer interaction (HCI) students in user workshops. We have identified five attractive characteristics of SH-PSS which influence the technology adoption. In this study, we provide these attractive characteristics as SH-PSS Reflection Criteria Cards for Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit. Research questions are formulated to address the idea generation ability enhancement, creativity enhancement and technology adoption discontinuity identification of SH-PSS Reflection Criteria Cards for Tiles IoT Inventor Toolkit. We have formulated a hypothesis to answer these research questions and test their experiments. These hypotheses should be tested in the experiment with the control and experiment groups. This study will be a significant contribution to design education. It is expected that design practitioners and researchers will get help in identifying consumer problems and exploring the technical capabilities of SH-PSS.

Design fiction is an approach to speculation about the future using a combination of prototyping and storytelling. It has recently received much attention in Human-Computer Interaction and design research. However, one of the criticisms of design fiction is that it is typically designed and developed by individuals with certain educational backgrounds and skillsets. Furthermore, design fiction has been criticized for being unrealistically imaginative rather than critical. The fictional scenarios in this instance will be proposals for the future rather than explorations of human-computer interaction possibilities.

In order to create a more profound outcome of design fiction as a research method, we combined it with participatory design and co-immersive simulation. This study came at the second phase after comprehensive expert interviews to explore the future of Extended Reality in design education, according to educators from different design institutions around the world. Based on the results of the expert interviews, we designed a stimulus toolkit for the participatory design fiction workshops and the co-immersive simulation sessions. After targeting design and related disciplines educators in the expert interviews phase, we designed the current study to support design students in reflecting critically and co-creating fictional scenarios about the future of design education and their role as designers. The workshop was divided into three sessions: a) introduction to the design fiction method and introduction to the study; b) participatory design fiction workshop, and; c) co-immersive simulation. A total of 90+ design students from Master’s level participated in the study. The data has been analyzed by adopting thematic analysis, discourse analysis and creative analysis. We report a multi-layer experience of using novel research methods of participatory design fiction and co-immersive simulation in the higher education context. We discuss the methodological implications, pointing out the opportunities this method opens as well as recommendations and guidelines for future-oriented studies. Finally, we draw a picture of the future of Extended Reality in design education and we propose a framework for the optimal integration of Extended Reality in the design classroom.