Abstract
When learning codesign, design students often find themselves in the anxious position of not knowing whether they know codesign. Codesign' emphasis on shared knowledge and facilitation stands in contrast to the individual knowledge and mastery cultivated by expert design, with which students are more familiar. Critical pedagogy, an emergent approach in design education that emphasizes developing critical consciousness of the contradictions behind design, is a promising candidate for learning the shared nature of codesign knowledge. To verify this possibility, this research conducted a critical pedagogy experiment with graduate design students in the United States supported by the Blind Side gamestorming technique. The evidence presented here consists of speech, gestures, and actions performed by the participants, captured on video, and analyzed through the interaction analysis method. The analysis of this evidence suggests that once students develop critical consciousness on the contradiction of knowledge co-creation, they become more confident to explore the unknown unknowns and create new knowledge.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.084
Citation
Jalali, A., Davalos, L.L.,and van Amstel, F.(2025) Now we know: Findings from a critical pedagogy experiment on the nature of codesign knowledge, in Clemente, V., Gomes, G., Reis, M., Félix, S., Ala, S., Jones, D. (eds.), Learn X Design 2025, 22-24 September 2025, Aveiro, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.084
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Full Paper
Now we know: Findings from a critical pedagogy experiment on the nature of codesign knowledge
When learning codesign, design students often find themselves in the anxious position of not knowing whether they know codesign. Codesign' emphasis on shared knowledge and facilitation stands in contrast to the individual knowledge and mastery cultivated by expert design, with which students are more familiar. Critical pedagogy, an emergent approach in design education that emphasizes developing critical consciousness of the contradictions behind design, is a promising candidate for learning the shared nature of codesign knowledge. To verify this possibility, this research conducted a critical pedagogy experiment with graduate design students in the United States supported by the Blind Side gamestorming technique. The evidence presented here consists of speech, gestures, and actions performed by the participants, captured on video, and analyzed through the interaction analysis method. The analysis of this evidence suggests that once students develop critical consciousness on the contradiction of knowledge co-creation, they become more confident to explore the unknown unknowns and create new knowledge.