Educating the Social Practitioner | Peter Lloyd

Design Education for Non-Designers: Educating the Social Practitioner | 非设计师的设计教育：培养社会实践者

In the upcoming September’s Engage with Ideas talk, Peter Lloyd, Professor of Integrated Design Methodology at TU Delft, will reflect on his article titled: Does design education always produce designers? The article was presented at the first 2011 LearnXdesign international conference hosted in the historical Bourse de Commerce in Paris. At that time the conference series was known as DRS//cumulus.

In the article, Peter distinguished between two types of approaches for equipping graduates with ‘design thinking’ skills. One of these approaches, mostly promoted by the business schools, was to enable students to add value or efficiency to business with the aim of increasing profits. The second approach more closely connected to ethos of the Design Literacy, which aims to empower “a wider range of ‘non-designing’ people” (p. 211)

The paper describes how the academic team who develop an introductory online ‘Design Thinking’ course at the Open University (UK) drew on various theories to conceptualise the course content and its learning activities. For example, the team adopted the concept of ‘the social practitioner’ rather than the well-established concept of the ‘Reflective Practitioner’ (Schön 1983) to guide what content and learning outcome would support ‘construction’ of these envisaged ‘social practitioners’.

The reason for this departure, was that the Open University (UK) academic team faced a dilemma on how to incorporate the established face-to-face and one-to-one design studio learning practices (i.e. the master apprentice approach), as observed by Donald Schön (1983, 1985), into an online learning environment and with a relatively large student cohort. Thus, to overcome this perceived limitation posed by the concept of ‘Reflective Practitioner’, the Open University (UK) academic team adopted the concept of ‘the social practitioner’.  By doing this the Open University (UK) academic team focussed on how “a wide range of student expertise can potentially feed into the design process”.  For example, an expectation in the co-design process is that various stakeholders including the end users will be intimately involved in shaping the design solution. For this approach to work, the assumption is that the non-designers’ are design literate. So one can envisage that for these diverse ‘social practitioners’ to skilfully feed into the design process they will need to be design literate.

The paper provides a brief, but nevertheless a valuable, insight on how courses at the world-renown Open University (UK) were developed and operationalised.  It also outlines the various activities and how they contributed to constructing and producing ‘social practitioners’.

We hope you will engage with Peter in this upcoming 10^th September’s talk.

Peter Lloyd is a Professor of Integrated Design Methodology. He teaches in the areas of design process, design ethics, and design theory and methodology. Recent work has focussed on how designers and AI can work in dialogue with one another. He has been a leading player in the influential Design Thinking Research Symposium series since 1994, is a chair of the Design Research Society, and former Editor-in-Chief of the leading design research journal Design Studies.

References

Lloyd, P. (2011). Does Design Education Always Produce Designers? In E. Bohemia, B. Borja de Mozota, & L. Collina (Eds.), Researching Design Education: 1st International Symposium for Design Education Researchers: Researching Design Education (pp. 210–227). CUMULUS ASSOCIATION and DRS. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs2011-learnxdesign/

Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.

Schön, D. A. (1985). The Design Studio: An Exploration of its Traditions and Potentials. RIBA Publications Limited.