Competency Domains for Systemic Design Education

Abstract

Systemic design is an emergent field demanded by the complexity and the scale of 21st-century problems. Its objective is to provide a holistic vision over fragmented entities to design responsibly for an incremental change. For addressing the complexity of societal and environmental problems; it is important to equip future designers with the broad systemic design skill set. Industrial design education needs to be restructured and regularly updated to transfer required competencies compatible with the nature of the contemporary issues. Competency Domain Model (CDM) proposed in this paper, lists and categorizes the essential designer competencies in four different domains. This classification could serve as a framework for the educational reforms in the near future, and facilitate meaningful communication between different design programs. The model is applied to 15 industrial design departments in Turkey in order to understand the current status of design education in the national context and to present its potentials for the others. Research results are shared within the context of insider knowledge.

Keywords

Systemic design, design education, competency model, orders of design

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Jul 9th, 12:00 AM

Competency Domains for Systemic Design Education

Systemic design is an emergent field demanded by the complexity and the scale of 21st-century problems. Its objective is to provide a holistic vision over fragmented entities to design responsibly for an incremental change. For addressing the complexity of societal and environmental problems; it is important to equip future designers with the broad systemic design skill set. Industrial design education needs to be restructured and regularly updated to transfer required competencies compatible with the nature of the contemporary issues. Competency Domain Model (CDM) proposed in this paper, lists and categorizes the essential designer competencies in four different domains. This classification could serve as a framework for the educational reforms in the near future, and facilitate meaningful communication between different design programs. The model is applied to 15 industrial design departments in Turkey in order to understand the current status of design education in the national context and to present its potentials for the others. Research results are shared within the context of insider knowledge.