Nowadays, designers deal with increasingly complex and meaningful challenges. Because of that, design schools are required to deliver professional designers capable of handling what future decades might bring. Therefore, resilience, generally described as the process of adapting well in the presence of adversity, makes it a valuable quality future generations of designers could develop. As resilience is still an abstract concept within the education domain, this MSc graduation project aimed to explore how it could be built and enhanced in such context. The approach chosen to tackle that question was initially to analyse the literature regarding resilience. Then, to perform an in-depth autoethnographic study in a moment resilience was systematically present in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering: the COVID19 lockdowns. Finally, the learnings from that period and previous literature research were synthesized into a theoretical framework that aims to assist educators in conceptualizing interventions to foster resilience in learning systems. This framework was implemented to design and evaluate My Rubric, a co-creative guide for adaptive assessment, which aims to offer a constructive and resilient alternative to the current rubric.

Nowadays, designers deal with increasingly complex and meaningful challenges. Because of that, design schools are required to deliver professional designers capable of handling what future decades might bring. Therefore, resilience, generally described as the process of adapting well in the presence of adversity, makes it a valuable quality future generations of designers could develop.

As resilience is still an abstract concept within the education domain, this thesis aimed to explore how it could be built and enhanced in such a context. The approach chosen to tackle that question was initially to analyze the literature regarding resilience. Then, to perform an in-depth autoethnographic study in a moment I believed resilience was systematically achieved in the Industrial Design Engineering faculty: the COVID19 lockdowns. Finally, I synthesized the learnings from that period and previous literature research into a theoretical framework that aims to assist educators in conceptualizing interventions to foster Resilience in Learning Systems.

This framework was implemented to design and evaluate MyRubric, a co-creative guide for adaptive assessment, which aims to offer a constructive, resilient alternative to the current rubric.