Abstract

Over the last decades, design research and design practice have become intertwined in a new way and design study programmes have to react to these changes, providing students with the ability to link their creative practice with scientific research. Design education has to develop solutions for this new demand and support these profound changes of the discipline itself by addressing these issues from the very beginning of design education on, the BA-level. In order to better understand what the problems are when carrying out research in design, this paper aims to contribute to the topic of the integration of research in design practice by outlining results from a mixed-methods case study conducted at New Design University/Austria. In this study, required main competencies on the part of students in every phase of a holistic design process, which includes research as well as practice, were identified and quantitatively assessed by the students themselves and their teachers, followed by problem-centred interviews with students.

Keywords

design education research, design research, design practice, design process, main competencies

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Conference Track

Research Paper

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Sep 24th, 9:00 AM

Doing research in design: Inquiry of the key competences needed to integrate research in design practice

Over the last decades, design research and design practice have become intertwined in a new way and design study programmes have to react to these changes, providing students with the ability to link their creative practice with scientific research. Design education has to develop solutions for this new demand and support these profound changes of the discipline itself by addressing these issues from the very beginning of design education on, the BA-level. In order to better understand what the problems are when carrying out research in design, this paper aims to contribute to the topic of the integration of research in design practice by outlining results from a mixed-methods case study conducted at New Design University/Austria. In this study, required main competencies on the part of students in every phase of a holistic design process, which includes research as well as practice, were identified and quantitatively assessed by the students themselves and their teachers, followed by problem-centred interviews with students.

 

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