Connecting the PhD in Design: How PhDs label their Thesis Research

As design research matures, more designers pursue a PhD. In its turn, the PhD itself is changing from a solitary preparation for a career in academia toward an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary and international experience and a greater variety of jobs. These developments call for greater opportunities for PhD candidates to build their...

Towards strengthening Methods in Design Education and Practice

Design skills and methods have been at the conceptual foundation of the design discipline(s) for at least the past half century. Over this period, design has also changed, focusing on new outcomes, serving new goals, and addressing different scales and broader application areas. On the one hand, there is a large set of methods and tools; on the...

Constructing and storytelling: accommodating different play orientations in learning spatial thinking

Spatial ability is malleable and belongs in the preschool. For preschoolers, many analytical activities with one correct answer such as tangram have been developed. Less is known about employing open-ended design assignments to creatively practice spatial thinking. Little attention has been paid to the mutual qualitative differences between...

Guiding the PhD in design: Experiences from six programs

In the DoCS4Design project, six established PhD programmes in design pooled and compared the diversity in their practices in guiding PhDs (e.g., 3- or 4-year programmes, small or large amounts of formal education, small or large numbers of staff and students). Panelists from the six programmes discussed these differences to- gether with 60...

Innovating a Large Design Education Program at a University of Technology

Over the last half century, design education has diversified and developed considerably, in part in the arts academies, and increasingly in universities and vocational technical education. The TU Delft design program was founded in 1969, and has since grown quickly into a large, university-based, technology-aligned set of programs presently...

Designers coping with culture in an educational setting

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study about how design students cope with culture in the i-do (international design opportunity) series of international design workshops in Hong Kong. We wanted to learn three things. (1) To what extent do the design students from different nations share common cultural values? (2) what...