Exploring the field of Design Education

Abstract

This project is executed with and for the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) of the TU Delft. Over the last half-century, IDE’s education for designers has diversified and evolved considerably, in part of art academies and technical education (Voûte et al., 2020). Societal changes, the maturing of design as an academic discipline between science and engineering and international developments of the educational system, have stimulated this growth. Now the faculty is innovating its education again. After innovating the Bachelor, the faculty is starting to look at opportunities to innovate the Master program. The initial assignment of this thesis originated from two observations: the broadening role of the designer and the changing learning behavior of students. The initial assignment includes the investigation of learning experiences that respond to the combination of the two, to investigate opportunities for IDE: design and education. However, innovating in the educational sector is something that is time consuming, with many people involved. And while investigating these new opportunities, the world outside the walls of the faculty is changing constantly by changing much quicker than we think.Based on the research of the context, it appeared that IDE, despite their high-quality education, can already see challenge in keeping its relevancy as well its position as a leader in the education for designers. This is influenced by their limited role in multidisciplinary projects, how to respond to the digital world and the broadening role of the design profession in the working field. Hence, the research question for this thesis is formulated following: What learning experiences are seen as most valuable when entering the world outside IDE and contribute to the preparation of the MSc. student? After the deconstruction of the current context, the future context of both fields of design and education is investigated with the aid of the ViP approach where “opportunities of the future” are investigated. This resulted into a two-dimensional framework, that guides as the future view of the education of the designer that was evaluated with the core competencies of design to investigate the value of possible directions that resulted into the design focus. That consisted of three different design visions resulting in three different design directions including a statement, interaction vision and experience qualities. Within the interaction visions, the relationship between an IDE student and its education were designed. Three learning experience concepts were developed and combined into a whole new Master experience of IDE that transforms the traditional structure. In short, the new Master experience includes learning experiences that focus on the individual in the whole (1), creating reciprocal learning relations (2) and aims to increase the value of designers in multidisciplinary teams (3). As this learning experience is designed from an envisioned future, supported by extensive stakeholder research and the student’s needs, it would contribute to Master innovation by offering these learning experiences that are perceived as valuable in the transformation from design student to a design professional. Also, a first validation round is held over the whole Master experience including the learning experience concepts, where the experiences were critically but positively validated. The developed final experience next to additional learnings in this thesis derived from exploring the future, made that focusing on preparing design students to work with other disciplines equally and going beyond the traditional design discipline of IDE, should be main concerns of the faculty. The design process of this thesis puts light on designing the initial interaction between students and IDE, that resulted in more recommendations. This included a focus on the wellbeing of the design student next to the future role of educators as things to take highly into account when innovating in the design education of IDE.