Designing Knowledge

Honestly, design students should be acquiring knowledge, not be tested on how much information they can retain. Speaking of my experience, I wanted to learn Object-Oriented Programming, but the workload on top of various other coursework forced me to ditch it. It made me abhor programming so much, that I vowed never to touch it ever again. As some person who’s identity I forgot puts it, once their kid were forced to read in school, as if the kid’s past love for reading was but an illusion, started to dislike books.

Nobody likes to be forced to do anything. Project-based learning is perhaps the better alternative. The student learns to do what they want to learn, by acquiring all the necessary methods to complete it. An educator can be the mitigator, to help create a scenario where the student enjoys the task, as well as making sure enough things can be learned through it. 

In the design school scenario, the design student comes to the instructor, to pitch a design concept, as well as the steps necessary to create the final product (concept generation — presentation — time-tabling — planning). The instructor must then decide whether 

1. the design fits with the course
2. it is possible to do within the time frame
3. changes must be made to accommodate for more (to make the project more sophisticated) or less (simplifying to meet deadline)

The goal is slightly different than passing a course or getting a high mark. The core principle to this process is to make sure that the student will acquire the knowledge they seek, in hopes to become the designer they want to be. All of these will secure their future position in the rough world of design employment.

In the world of educators, this process is called Backward Design Model — but with an added twist. It is a process of acquiring knowledge, not only by the educator, but together with their pupil. A co-design curriculum, to say the least. This’ll prove to be useful, as it incorporates the instructor’s real-world expertise together with a student’s willingness to learn.

But alas, there’s lots of shortcomings to this model. For starters, the bigger the class, the harder it is to implement this one-on-one curriculum. Also, certain projects will suffer with this.

The point is, there are still many other ways for students to acquire knowledge in the design school the antiquated process should be rid of, and newer concepts should be implemented.