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...

The Delft Fundamentals: integration of disciplines, projects and analysis

As part of the renewal in 2013/2014 of the bachelor education curriculum in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, a new study programme was prepared on the Fundamentals (in Dutch: Grondslagen) of spatial design. The teaching approach, visually presented by some examples and explained in this...

Forming a mindset: Design students' preconceptions about the usefulness of systematic methods

Teaching students to use systematic design methods effectively is not straightforward. While method teaching often focuses on the procedural aspects of method usage (e.g., what steps to take and in what order), effectively using a systematic method entails more than following its ‘instructions’. As noted by Andreasen [1], students need to be...

The ambiguous role of methods in design education: Initial findings from the Delft method study