Case Studies of Design Teaching
From Design Education in iSchools
This page is for people to record anecdotes, experiences, and case studies of teaching design. While we are also more than happy to see more formal research into design education, we expect that such studies are rare, and we feel that a lot can be learned from unsystematic reflection on design education experiences.
In particular, we are interested in:
- Anecdotes
- Experiences
- Stories
- Vignettes
- Coffee Talk
Links related to teaching design:
- Anecdotes, Experiences, and Case Studies of Teaching Design
- Problems Teaching Design - This is a page for bringing up problems people typically face teaching design to their students, and for us to have a discussion about strategies to address those problems.
- Persistent Conversation on Design Education - This is a page for more general conversations about design education.
- We will also be discussing things on the google group:
Please feel free to add your own sections on this page, and to create links from this page to new pages that you have created for longer stories or conversations.
Design Phobias (Cameron Jones & Mike Twidale)
One way we have started thinking about student problems with "designing" has been by characterizing them as "phobias". We don't mean that students need to seek psychological counseling, but we call them phobias because they are common (not specific to just an individual) and have some element or degree of irrationality. However, unlike most phobias, design phobias do not necessarily manifest themselves as acutely as say, a fear of spiders. Also, we are usually unaware of our design phobias, and have difficulty recognizing that we have them.
Examples:
- Design Acrophobia
- Design Agoraphobia
- too many choices, options, possibilities in a design space - so cling desperately to your first idea in the teeth of all counter evidence
- Fear of getting started
- Fear of failure
- Fear of embarrassment
- Most apparent in non-CS graduate students. They are much more comfortable reading more and more about design and talking about papers of design, but not actually doing design. It is both a kind of procrastination, but also a reluctance to commit or open oneself up to the criticism they subject other designs to.
(I will come back and provide descriptions of these later, just wanted to get something started -- Cameron)
Related Links
- Design Education in iSchools Home Page
- Design Methods
- Collaborative Design Bibliography
- Persistent Conversation on Design Education
- Anecdotes, Experiences, and Case Studies of Teaching Design
- Problems Teaching Design
- Sign up to participate
