Abstract
Central to the development of transition design is its foundation in higher education. The theoretical basis that informs the practice of transition design develops from an emergent process comprised of hypotheses, theory, and testing in educational settings. These approaches—which focus on tackling specific, complex, placed-based challenges—must be tailored to address the nature of specific contexts and the varied learning of student cohorts and their respective needs. This paper investigates the value and thoughtful integration of transition design practices into design education and proposes curricula for undergraduate design students. It outlines methods and tools that are utilized in our teaching, describes successes, identifies challenges, presents ideas for improvement, and proposes opportunities for development.
Keywords
transition design, education, curricula, teaching
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.282
Citation
Rohrbach, S., and Steenson, M. (2018) Transition Design: teaching and learning, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.282
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Transition Design: teaching and learning
Central to the development of transition design is its foundation in higher education. The theoretical basis that informs the practice of transition design develops from an emergent process comprised of hypotheses, theory, and testing in educational settings. These approaches—which focus on tackling specific, complex, placed-based challenges—must be tailored to address the nature of specific contexts and the varied learning of student cohorts and their respective needs. This paper investigates the value and thoughtful integration of transition design practices into design education and proposes curricula for undergraduate design students. It outlines methods and tools that are utilized in our teaching, describes successes, identifies challenges, presents ideas for improvement, and proposes opportunities for development.