Traditionally, design -- and by extension design education -- has focused on the creation of distinct outputs (forms, artefacts, and objects) that satisfy a specific purpose and need. Historically these needs -- and often the designed outputs themselves -- have been dictated not by the designer but by clients and also through established…

Designing built environments demands the ability to make translations between your visions, visual representations of these, and the full-scale environment that is to be built. Pupils working on architectural tasks face these challenges of translation. How can the teacher come to their aid? Research on teaching strategies for the architectural…

Learning in makerspaces is free from curriculum and evaluation and is believed to yield practical, self-driven and solution-oriented learners. This study explores how makerspace pedagogy can be emulated in formal higher education settings to support this kind of learning. Action research was used to cultivate and review this pedagogical approach…

Design and craft education, like that of the Swedish school subject, Sloyd, has great potential for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). With so many possibilities, it is relevant to investigate what teachers teach about sustainability, and how. Therefore, the aim of this article is to examine what Sloyd teachers express that they do as…

"Making" has been used to describe an internally motivated iterative design process that embodies notions of playful building and tinkering. Recently, interest in applying making to PK-12 education has increased. As schools add facilities dedicated to making, there is a need to support teachers in effectively utilizing these makerspaces.…

"Making" is a rapidly emerging form of educational practice that involves the design, construction, testing, and revision of a wide variety of objects, using high and low technologies, and integrating a range of disciplines including art, science, engineering, and mathematics. It has garnered widespread interest and support in both…

The notion of design thinking is becoming more concrete nowadays, as design researchers and practitioners study the thinking processes involved in design and employ the concept of design thinking to foster better solutions to complex and ill-defined problems. The goal of the present research is to develop a cognitive activity-based design…

In many of our universities and colleges there is a long established approach to teaching design through practice. For most students their end goal is to achieve a level of capability to function as designers in the professional world. Their education helps them construct a passport to enter this community of professional practice. Part of the…

Taking advantage of a university-wide initiative that requires all students during their course of study to take at least one of their writing intensive classes in their major, the author relates how he was spurred to formulate one of his graphic design studio classes to accommodate the writing-intensive requirement. He had been intuitively…

This article reports a survey which aimed to examine the present situation in Design and Craft Education (D&C) in Iceland in terms of teachers' general standing and their teaching inside the Icelandic elementary schools. A questionnaire was sent to 170 D&C teachers in Icelandic elementary schools. The questionnaire was completed by 101…

Learning to be an artist or designer is a complex process of becoming. Much of the early phase of "learning to be" occurs during the time emerging artists and designers are students in university art/design programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Recent research reveals that a critical role in assisting students in their…

This paper describes a pedagogical experiment in which a suite of novel blended learning strategies was used to replace the traditional role of design tutors in a first year architectural design studio. The pedagogical objectives, blended learning strategies and outcomes of the course are detailed. While the quality of the student design work…

As a consequence of fruitful discussions about joining theory and practice both in design research and educational design programmes, this article aims to explore phenomenological parameters in the framework of an exercise for Engineer-architecture students from the University of Leuven in Belgium. Relying upon the arguments of recognised…

The power of 3D printing technology has grown exponentially in just the past few years--people around the world are using 3D printers to prepare food, create tailored clothing, build cars and homes, and advance the medical field in ways that never seemed possible. In classrooms across the nation, 3D printers have become increasingly common because…

This study examined the impact of teaching creativity in the form of associative thinking strategies within a metacognitive framework. A representative sample of 30 university design students was selected from a larger section (N = 122) to participate in a 16-week supplemental course. Each week a new creative thinking strategy was integrated with…