Output details

Design Education as a Passport to Professional Practice

This research is a longitudinal study based on the outcomes of The Centre of Excellence for Product and Automotive Design (originally funded through HEFCE’s- Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning) with cohorts of industrial design students. It explores several themes including design education in the context of the design community of practice; the internationalisation of design education; threshold concepts in design education; and the exploration of visual and spatial creativity through digital technologies.

At the core of this research was the evaluation of pedagogic models through their implementation in the teaching studio, and feedback on their efficacy. The paper presents findings which represent the synthesis of concepts that underpin design pedagogy, through threshold concepts of scholarship and the established constructs of communities of practice. It identifies that design students confront particular and special capabilities of design thinking which requires them to travel through a key threshold labelled the ‘toleration of design uncertainty’.