Abstract
Design professionals are increasingly expected to work in interdisciplinary teams, often working together to solve more and more complex problems. This may contradict aspects of traditional design education where effort (and assessment) was focused on the skills of the creative individual. While expertise or skill in a specific discipline is still critical to perform as a designer, a greater awareness and understanding of other disciplines is required. These educational challenges are further compounded in a new Product Design programme at AUT University due to its relatively small number of students. However, developing a new programme presents an opportunity to support new approaches to teaching and learning, without the constraints of institutional history and tradition. An innovative pedagogical approach to product design was developed that expands the definition of a ‘product’ to become ‘the product of’ a creative design process rather than necessarily the tangible, physical 3D product outcomes. This paper outlines and discusses the key aspects of the learning and teaching approach that underpins the postgraduate Product Design Programme at AUT. Practical examples of learning and teaching interventions, in and outside the curriculum, are presented; along with examples to demonstrate how these have been incorporated into practice-based postgraduate research projects. In addition a holistic approach that has been taken to integrate the key learning and teaching elements to develop a framework that will be the foundation for further curriculum development in the postgraduate programme is discussed.
Keywords
Design Thinking, Curriculum Development, Learning and Teaching
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.117
Citation
Reay, S.D.,and Withell, A.(2013) Educating multidisciplinary postgraduate product design students: challenges for a new programme, in Reitan, J.B., Lloyd, P., Bohemia, E., Nielsen, L.M., Digranes, I., & Lutnæs, E. (eds.), DRS // Cumulus: Design Learning for Tomorrow, 14-17 May, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.117
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Educating multidisciplinary postgraduate product design students: challenges for a new programme
Design professionals are increasingly expected to work in interdisciplinary teams, often working together to solve more and more complex problems. This may contradict aspects of traditional design education where effort (and assessment) was focused on the skills of the creative individual. While expertise or skill in a specific discipline is still critical to perform as a designer, a greater awareness and understanding of other disciplines is required. These educational challenges are further compounded in a new Product Design programme at AUT University due to its relatively small number of students. However, developing a new programme presents an opportunity to support new approaches to teaching and learning, without the constraints of institutional history and tradition. An innovative pedagogical approach to product design was developed that expands the definition of a ‘product’ to become ‘the product of’ a creative design process rather than necessarily the tangible, physical 3D product outcomes. This paper outlines and discusses the key aspects of the learning and teaching approach that underpins the postgraduate Product Design Programme at AUT. Practical examples of learning and teaching interventions, in and outside the curriculum, are presented; along with examples to demonstrate how these have been incorporated into practice-based postgraduate research projects. In addition a holistic approach that has been taken to integrate the key learning and teaching elements to develop a framework that will be the foundation for further curriculum development in the postgraduate programme is discussed.