Learner Centered Industrial Design Education

Soumitri Varadarajan & Helen McLean

There is a felt need in some teaching staff, and among teaching and learning researchers, for a narrative of industrial design education that shows the demonstrated effectiveness of a bold and progressive ecology of learning owned and enacted by students. Such a program aligns with the call from university of a less teacher dependent, and more entrepreneurially minded teaching practice as is visible, at RMIT and other universities, in the technology disciplines. It is usual to see design and build projects entirely student run by students, as in the case of electric and solar car challenges, being duly credited by the academic programs. The practitioner, the crit and a fixed notion of signature pedagogy is absent, or can be constructed as a post-facto narrative.

Our objective is to inform the reader about progressive pedagogies, and about how they can benefit and transform contemporary Industrial Design education. In our writing, we bring a unique transnational narrative, drawn from the experience of teaching and conducting capacity development activities for teachers around the world, both Asia and Europe, that demonstrated an effective negotiation of the competing forces of continuity and change Theory in our account goes further; as in we have deployed constructivist thinking in education where the primacy of the Crit and the Jury gives way to assessments becoming a learning activity, when undertaken by students. The authors have set up and run courses, trained staff and helped them run courses, published in papers, and supervised PhD Cohorts looking at Design Pedagogy from diverse perspectives such as channeling such as Freire and Vygotsky. We have also overseen projects where published literature on program of capacity development for the rural poor, has informed the understanding of agency in the learner. Our empirical work has also informed our understanding, shared with Davis, of the use and misuse of power within the project of 'enculturation' that can be design education.