In Asia, Product Design Education in Japan is considered to be well established. Although a variety of studies relating to product design education have taken place, comparative research studies relating to the development of the product design education curriculum and identification of its characteristics in different universities have been relatively few. This paper aims to identify and illustrate the characteristics of product design education curriculum in Japan based on a comparative study between two sample universities; Chiba University and Kyushu University. Research was conducted through a literature review, visits to the respective universities and consultations with their educators. The literature review was conducted by reviewing student handbooks, course curriculum booklets and syllabuses for the period between 1970 and 2008. School magazines, department brochures and historical records were also reviewed. From this study, it was found that the design education in the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology may have influenced the product design education curriculum in Chiba University. The product design education curriculum in Chiba University and Kyushu University was structured based on the study of different specialized fields. In Chiba University, a Collaborative Research and Design Project was offered to allowed knowledge from different fields of specialization to synthesize. This module was offered as a form of final year graduation project during the last year of study. In Kyushu University however, a similar project came in the form of an elective module offered for a single semester. The broadbased education offered by Chiba University and Kyushu University may also be related to the somewhat unique attributes of Japanese industry, where most graduates receive training on work etiquette and specific professional knowledge through one to six months of in-firm induction program after entering a company.

The benefits of user trials for usability testing and developing an understanding of a user centred approach to design is well documented and widely recognised in the commercial world. This paper details how the author has incorporated user centred design principles via the practice and theory of user trials primarily into undergraduate Industrial Design education and the benefits the approach has generated. Importantly, the undergraduate user trialling subject has run in a similar but ongoing and developing format for ten years continuous within the University setting. This continuity and longitudinal aspect has allowed for feedback and reflection to be incorporated into the on-going refinements to the subject and projects. Observations by the author and feedback from students demonstrate the positive outcomes of this subject; from understanding and applying relevant methods to the awareness that designers themselves are not good examples of typical users and those typical users will in fact use products in various unexpected ways. The benefits of user trials become obvious to students when they see users interacting with their product. The project’s learning outcomes build on fundamental content for Industrial Design students and links directly to core industrial design subjects and design research methods.
The project has become one of the most successful in the Industrial Design course, and consistently receives positive feedback from students. The project generates student interest by involving them in a hands-on project, and is highly effective in meeting its learning objectives. This paper details the theoretical background, relationship with the overall curriculum and design of the project, as well as giving some practical examples of student work.

Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning (OBTL) or Outcomes Based Approach (OBA) is an educational reform model that became a popular teaching approach that undergone several development in the recently decades. It is commonly used in tertiary education for different fields of studies nowadays.
As more different aspects of studies adopted OBTL as the main framework of pedagogy in nowadays, so can it also able to apply in the design education nowadays? This paper tries to explore how the model and concept of OBTL could be applied in the design education nowadays as well as to provide another insightful reference for different educators and scholars. With case study on teaching typography in the OBTL approach, a clear understanding on how OBTL could bring new changes to traditional design education to improve and facilitate the whole learning process for our students to achieve a better design outcome.

In this paper we suggest strategies and techniques for attaining sustained innovation via the suspension of developing concrete embodiments in favour of maintaining more abstract conceptualisation in early phases of the design process. Introducing these strategies to our design students as part of their education serves to prepare them for a technologically turbulent future.
The early phases of the design process, which relate to conceptualisation, set the direction for the development of the embodiment phases of product design. As product designers we work in turbulent times. Technological change and innovation is increasing at an almost exponential rate of change. As the pace of technical innovations utilised within the new products we design advances, so does our need to develop our understanding of thinking strategies that enable us to develop new design concepts. Many strategies for the creative development of new products exist, however these tend to relate to ‘reverse engineering’ and addressing creative embodiment issues. Additionally, they rely on detailing specifications of the problem and focusing on the detailed embodiment issues early in the design process. However, some studies suggest separating ideas from the detailed embodiment of ideas enhances our opportunities for the development of creative ideas. This suggests some creative strategies are more suited to the early phases of the design process, and some creative strategies are more suited to assisting in creative embodiments. The central theme of this paper relates to the notion that learning to forestall creative embodiments, separating Creative ideas from the Creative embodiment of ideas at the Fuzzy Front End of the New Product Design process, enhances opportunities for creating truly innovative products.

This paper is based on the outcomes and context of writing, refining and teaching a course in Creative Thinking Processes to undergraduate and postgraduate students across nine Faculties at UNSW over a three-year period. It uses an original Four Cs model in presenting the context, concept, content and constraints of teaching creativity in an online environment. The paper also presents Combined Divergence, a model and methodology of creative thinking which developed as a result of teaching the course, and which was discussed as a chapter in the book The Creative Edge, published in 2008.
In considering how we think and create, we can generally explore research into neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive science. This establishes some of the concepts through which creative thinking has evolved, developed and been analysed and measured. How we think and create is not, however, just about the science of the brain. Our mindsets and methodologies of work and study can inhibit or enhance our creative abilities, and this is the main focus of this paper – it deals with constraints to our thinking and creativity (sometimes called limiting beliefs). It aims to create an applicable learning approach, with relevance and resonance for everyday life.
The paper will explore the sources of Current Creativity Concepts, which also includes the content of tools we can apply to push thoughts and ideas further, and to creatively develop them in more original ways. Student evaluations of the methodology of the course prove its effective and active cross-disciplinary use and this will be discussed in the paper’s conclusion.

This paper reports on a pilot investigation into the nature of teaching within the field of secondary design education in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Its purpose is to identify structural elements that enable the reproduction of cultural dispositions that undermine the capacity of human societies to establish viable futures. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, particularly his concepts of field, habitus and illusio, are used to inform the interpretation and discussion of the results. The theoretical framework also draws on the work of design theorist Tony Fry, particularly his concepts of defuturing and redirective practice. Ethnographic methods are used to derive an account of teaching practice from the perspective of a current practitioner. The study provides a provisional sketch of the structure of the field of secondary design education. Outcomes include the development of empirical data for the interpretation of teaching as defuturing, an improved understanding of how design educators develop an interest in sustaining the unsustainable, and a contribution to the conceptualisation of teaching as a form of redirective practice. These findings are significant for design and technology educators who must increasingly grapple with the question of how their work either strengthens or undermines a collective ability to sustain.

This paper introduces work-in-progress on a longitudinal, ethno-methodological case study of the process of establishing a new inter-disciplinary Bachelor of Creative Technologies (BCT) at Auckland University of Technology in 2008. The theoretical framework is supported and informed by data gathered in interviews with academics and others involved in the development and delivery of the program.
Informed by research into physical, virtual and networked studio-type environments, the project-organised BCT curriculum draws together elements of art, design, computing, engineering, mathematics, philosophy of technology, entrepreneurship and industry internships. The program is conceived as a “post-graduate program for undergraduates” or a “liberal education for the 21st century” which recognises that pervasive technologies lie at the heart of any modern cultural enterprise. Learning objectives are framed as research projects from Year 1, and intellectual independence is cultivated through active identification of contemporary issues leading to the formulation of new research hypotheses, methodologies and outcomes. Yet, while the BCT has been seen as ambitious or timely in challenging normative disciplinary boundaries and pedagogical practices, it has also attracted initial scepticism. In discussing the contested evolution of the program, this paper will draw on interviews with situated individuals to highlight frequently overlooked institutional investments in the micro-politics of disciplinarity, and how these influence the wider academic, socio-professional and industrial ecologies of practice within which we operate.
The paper will not dwell on the process-outcome relationship that forms the epistemological focus of most research into design education. Rather it will argue that in these new, information-rich, a-disciplinary ecologies, ontological tensions will tend to manifest themselves intersubjectively, reflecting aesthetic, social and/or ethical dispositions as well as disciplinary ones. This situation is compounded by the observation that the agencies of ‘professor’, ‘tutor’, ‘learner’ or ‘peer’ are frequently contingent, inverted or fluid enough to confound increasingly fragile institutional structures of authority and their expectations for predictable learning outcomes.

This paper examines the use of reflective writing as a learning activity within a new 4th year project-based mechanical engineering design course. The learning activity was a continuation of the use of critical reflection as a pedagogical model first introduced in a Faculty-wide common first year engineering design course.
In the new course, the pedagogy was centred on the “student as engineering design consultant”, utilising authentic learning experiences obtained through collaboration with industry who contributed a variety of commercial design problems for student design teams to work on. The course aims were to achieve a more balanced set of outcomes, integrating knowledge and skills from both technical and professional competencies. The learning activity was introduced in the 4th year course to leverage both the motivation of the student cohort as they contemplated graduation into the workforce, and the affective impact presented by engaging with industry.
Four written reflective tasks of 1.5 – 2 pages were assigned, aimed at addressing the Engineers Australia‟s Professional Engineering Stage 1 Competencies for independent learning, complex problem solving and demonstrating effective communication skills. The goal of the reflective writing tasks was to promote design thinking as a means of self-directed problem solving for professional practice. The topics for each task were also intended to prepare students for a career as a professional engineer and were assigned over the course of the semester.
From an analysis of the students‟ written responses it can be seen the extent to which reflection enhances the depth of the learning process and provides opportunities for students to move from the role of the learner to that of graduate engineering practitioner.

According to Lawson (2006), “One of the weaknessess of the traditional studio is that students, in paying too much attention to the end product of their labours, fail to reflect sufficiently on their process” (p.7). Within a design education context, lack of reflection can, it is argued here, lead to repetition of past mistakes due to an inablity to recognise the interrelatedness and significance of the various stages of designing. So the starting premis here is that if students can develop more awareness of their process, they may be more able to identify both their strengths and weaknesses. If students can also relate their process to the learning outcomes then a cross-checking system may facilitate not only meta-cognition of process but also greater awareness of how process can be more effectively related to achieving the learning outcomes. So, explicit awareness, rather than tacit understanding can be achieved.
This study reports findings of the first cycle of an action research investigation into design student meta-cognition. It does this through discussing how the formal inclusion of a design process map can be used to assist illustration students develop meta-cognitive awareness of their approach to a design task in relation to the learning outcomes of an assignment. While there are various maps which describe the design process; design procedure-problem analysis-design solution (Edelson, 2002); analysis-synthesis-appraisal- decision (Markus/Mayer, 1969, 1970); problem structuring, preliminary design, refinement and detailing (Cross, 2001); problem identification and definition, task planning and management, research and evaluation, ideation, idea selection and decision making, action and implementation, reflection in action, evaluation of process and progress (Wilson 2002); Swann’s (2002) model problem- analysis-synthesis-execution-production-evaluation was chosen to broadly represent the various stages of designing.
students, in paying too much attention to the end product of their labours, fail to reflect sufficiently on their process” (p.7). Within a design education context, lack of reflection can, it is argued here, lead to repetition of past mistakes due to an inablity to recognise the interrelatedness and significance of the various stages of designing. So the starting premis here is that if students can develop more awareness of their process, they may be more able to identify both their strengths and weaknesses. If students can also relate their process to the learning outcomes then a cross-checking system may facilitate not only meta-cognition of process but also greater awareness of how process can be more effectively related to achieving the learning outcomes. So, explicit awareness, rather than tacit understanding can be achieved.
This study reports findings of the first cycle of an action research investigation into design student meta-cognition. It does this through discussing how the formal inclusion of a design process map can be used to assist illustration students develop meta-cognitive awareness of their approach to a design task in relation to the learning outcomes of an assignment. While there are various maps which describe the design process; design procedure-problem analysis- design solution (Edelson, 2002); analysis-synthesis-appraisal-decision (Markus/Mayer, 1969, 1970); problem structuring, preliminary design, refinement and detailing (Cross, 2001); problem identification and definition, task planning and management, research and evaluation, ideation, idea selection and decision making, action and implementation, reflection in action, evaluation of process and progress (Wilson 2002); Swann’s (2002) model problem-analysis-synthesis-execution-production-evaluation was chosen to broadly represent the various stages of designing.

While artists have an established record of scholarship about the role of found objects in their work, there is a disappointing lack of scholarship that considers the role of found objects in design. Perhaps this can first be attributed to the different motivations by which an artist and a designer choose to incorporate a found object. With regards to our interest in found objects, this difference in motivations illuminates that primary reasons for selection are rooted in the source disciplines themselves. The found object in art has no responsibility to perform beyond its aesthetic affect, and the found object in design has no further responsibility beyond its pragmatic (i.e. mechanical, structural) affect. Because the incorporation of found objects is non-essential to all design solutions, then as designers, there is a need to explicitly understand the benefit of incorporating found objects, the criteria for their selection, their impact on design thinking, and their ramifications for use.
This paper will articulate four generative strategies for how found objects are / can be used within the design discipline: Resource Availability, Political Heuristics, Creative Heuristics and Aesthetic Heuristics. Design solutions from both architectural design and industrial design are used in support of the formation of these categories, which include work by Michael Rotondi, Phoenix Commotion, Baker + Hesseldenz Design, and LOT-EK.
Ultimately, this paper showcases the finished design work of students for an assignment titled “FOCO: The Found-Object Craft-Object,” in which each author must answer the question of how ought a found object be used in design. This student work was generated during the SPR 2009 and SPR 2010 semesters in a three credit hour graduate-level elective titled “Introduction to Craft.”

Interaction Design is a fast developing branch of Industrial Design. The availability of cheap microprocessors and sensor electronics allow interactions between people and products that were until recently impossible. This has added additional layers of complexity to the design process. Novice designers find it difficult to effectively juggle these complexities and typically tend to focus on one aspect at a time. They also tend to take a linear, step-by-step approach to the design process in contrast to expert designers who pursue “parallel lines of thought” whilst simultaneously co-evolving both problem and solution. (Lawson, 1993) This paper explores an approach that encourages designers (in this case novice designers) to take a parallel rather than linear approach to the design process. It also addresses the problem of social loafing that tends to occur in team activities.
Having students working in groups is generally considered to be a very important part of the industrial design education process. The benefits of group work compared to individual work are summarized as follows:
A. Realistic. Practicing industrial designers typically work in teams. The collaboration process is more efficient as a team. Activities such as problem solving and idea generation are generally tackled using group techniques such as brainstorming.
B. Higher output.
Professional industrial design projects typically have a timeframe extending well beyond the 13 weeks that make up a semester. In order to cover sufficient ground in a semester-long project it is necessary to combine the efforts of several students.
Methodology:
This paper describes a new approach to teaching interaction design which has been trialed in 2009 with 3rd year Undergraduate Industrial Design students at the Queensland University of Technology. The basic structure of this approach is to arrange students into teams of three where each student is responsible for a discrete aspect of the design: The Object, the Scenario and the Behavior. Students receive marks for their individual contribution as well as an aggregate team mark.
C. Peer based learning.
An important resource for learning is other students. In a group environment some students will always have strengths and weaknesses that will vary from individual to individual. Learning from each other’s strengths is important
D. Fewer assignments to mark.
Expected outcomes:
Giving feedback to students: otherwise known as formative assessment is an important means of providing students with information about how they are progressing and what they need to do to improve. With a smaller number of assignments to mark, the level of formative feedback per assignment can be much greater.
It is expected that because students have an aspect that they are responsibility for, they will be able to focus more readily on that aspect of the project whilst still having a vested interest in making sure the other aspects of the project are also considered. The second expected outcome is that students will maintain focus on their individual aspects throughout the project, creating a situation where problems and solutions can co-evolve.
The benefits of group based project work are quite clear. However many students hate working in groups.
This investigates the theory that innovation and resolution of complex problems is improved when team members are able to focus on one individual aspect of the design rather than having to resolve the entire project alone.

Designers are increasingly asked to find new concepts for products responding to the changing needs of consumers. The design brief is presented in a broader manner; the designer is asked to rethink the idea of conviviality and to develop new concepts for “sharing a cup of coffee or tea” within a specific cultural setting and encompassing a sustainable design approach.
The authors believe that design students should therefore receive specific training to assist them to develop their creative skills using “divergent thinking” methods.
This paper examines the way divergent thinking was used during a design workshop conducted in 2009, by the National Museum of Australia (Museum) for children between the ages of 5 and 12 years. It draws comparisons between this workshop and a transport design brief given to undergraduate students in 2008 at the University of Canberra (UC), Industrial Design course.
The paper analyses the outcomes of a creative workshop for a group of UC students at the Museum, using the same learning framework used with the children. The authors sought to test whether such a creative approach (if used in the tertiary education context) can free students’ minds, increase the creative output and prepare them for the competitive professional design field.

“In today’s competitive world of higher education, the tools of branding … help them succeed.” (Colyer 2005) Fashion lives in a fast pace - the media are constantly featuring new trends in quick succession so as to keep public interested. The impulses to re-create, to open up new horizons and to overthrow existing concepts are essential characteristics.
Fashion design schools are under the spotlight to come up with the hottest new designer that will lead to fresh air in the industry. The education universe is highly dominated by two universities: Central Saint Martins (London); and Parson’s School of Design (NY). They are among the better known schools that constantly produce talents for the fashion industry.
On our study we have conducted an analysis of the fashion education timeline and its characteristics. This study resulted in a scheme model built to highlight the main vectors in the fashion design education field – its influences and reinforcements and how these schools direct their communication and offer to their audience.
The emerging ideas from this study show that several factors contribute to increase awareness and media attention to the school and its students. Similar aspects were identified in both schools: communication, fashion exposure, location. It was the study of these vectors that allowed us to argue the strategy that leads these institutions to achieve top of mind awareness on the design and creativity fields. We also argue that higher education on the fashion field is highly influenced by famous fashion designers that become ambassadors of the institutions and ultimately reinforce the school image and their ability to produce talented design professionals. This study adds new insights to the fashion design education and to the creativity learning through its interdisciplinary connections and by showing how they address and position themselves through diverse communication strategies.

“Methodological straight-jackets can only suppress the emergence of new ideas. Theoretical imperialism is stifling... many people repeat these principles most piously, even turning them into some kind of orthodoxy; very few actually come up with new ideas by putting them into practice.”
Introduction to Detachément (by Michel Serres), René Girard Operating in the margins of contemporary architectural debates the critical location of design methods has been relegated to educational blind spots. In order to participate creatively and ethically with changing political, geographical and cultural space-scapes, this paper suggests broadening critical exposure to a more diverse range of design methods than typically encountered in schools of architecture. I will frame several design methods hoping to augment conventional means for design towards more effective cultural and experiential agency. The methods range from automatic practices that favor the suppression of rational reflection to syntactical approaches developed by procedural rules, derived logically. And from gesture translation that foregrounds the formal translation of body gesture(s) to content to form where ideas precede the formal development of a project.
Design methods afford different ends in different situations- a proposition for a new city in China suggests working differently than on a thesis interested in the hybridization of biomorphic forms and the logics of a puzzle. Or, the design of a strip mall might be designed differently than on a spatial proposal based on the interpretation of a mythical narrative.
Technological advances are challenging typological fixity and static notions of architecture. To creatively respond to these and the aforementioned developments we must diversify our tactical, strategic and conceptual awareness of the possibilities. I will suggest that increased design agility, via design method expansion, is critical if architecture and its education are to act as creative agents toward a cultural imaginary in a contemporary world driven by change.

This paper explores first year design education in the Interior Architecture program at the University of New South Wales by conceiving the interpretive nature of the design process as a “threshold concept”. According to Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land (2002), threshold concepts in learning and teaching represent a transformative and irreversible way of understanding a subject, likened to a portal through which a previously inaccessible way of thinking is opened up to the learner and without which the learner cannot progress. The paper explores the ways in which the interpretive nature of the design process can be characterised as a threshold concept and hence how processes of interpretation can be embedded in curricula and modeled for students through structured and unstructured activities in the design studio.

From the first moment, if we detach ourselves from our set courses, reading lists and curriculum, it can seem at architecture school, predominantly a design school, we offer the contrary to what our programs announce. In a paradoxical way, with the best intentions in the world, we might be preparing young students for the necessary skills currently required within what is, or has been, predominantly a design profession, whilst at the same time – for some of them - closing their architectural mind. How do we embrace this paradox: teaching a locked world openly, or locking an open world? And if we recognise the accuracy of this, how would we work within it? Might we use our own reflective tests to open up a critical self for the students? By so doing we might take the first necessary steps to move students away from the anxiously graded world and the prescriptive and help them engage and situate their own learning. The course entitled Don’t Go So Fast, You’ll Crash into Roland Barthes is an interactive, critical pedagogy focusing on teaching at the very first moment of a design school; that moment when students enter the university and attend their first lectures on design, architecture and society. Some enter straight from high school whilst others navigate introductory courses in art, architectural history and theory as electives to see if a design profession suits them.2 The lectures, presentations, seminar and blackboard sessions, dialogues, exchanges and exercises make up a self-monitored Subjective Atlas, submitted by the students at the end of the course.3 The line is clear, the question is clear: if we are not to close the architectural mind too early, how does one teach design, architecture, culture, science and society in an accelerated moment of dispassion without consciously exploring an unstable and imperfect pedagogy? 4

Play is often seen as an unproductive yet structured pastime intended to provide enjoyment to its participants. For young children play is seen as a vital aspect to the learning process, gearing young minds in all aspects of role playing, socialization and understanding the material and making of the world. Play is a conduit for the imagination and though seemingly unproductive sows the seeds for creativity and understanding of the world.
Why not then can’t we see the value of play as seen in young children through a slightly different lens to reveal ways of looking at the design studio pedagogy. After all our craft is one where imagination, creativity, problem solving and collaboration are at the core of our practice. On one level play is seen as unproductive time though on another it provides vital rehearsals and experimentation for future action in life. Perhaps if we revalue play we need to let go of some of the prescriptions and assumed outcomes and accept the value of experimentation for its own sake, whether or not the outcome is seen as successful within defined parameters. This paper will explore the various aspects of design pedagogy through the lens of play and how it may challenge understandings of assessment and outcomes, group work and collegiality in the studio. It will also look to the importance of synthesizing multiple aspects of design through making, trial and error and even failure as important rehearsals for imaginative, creative and adaptable future design professionals.

This paper presents a series of ongoing experiments to facilitate serendipity in the design studio through a diversity of delivery modes. These experiments are conducted in a second year architectural design studio, and include physical, dramatic and musical performance.
The act of designing is always exploratory, always seeking an unknown resolution, and the ability to see and capture the value in the unexpected is a critical aspect of such creative design practice. Engaging with the unexpected is however a difficult ability to develop in students. Just how can a student be schooled in such abilities when the challenge and the context are unforeseeable? How can students be offered meaningful feedback about an issue that cannot be predicted, when feedback comes in the form of extrinsic assessment from a tutor?
This project establishes a number of student activities that seek to provide intrinsic feedback from the activity itself. Further to this, the project seeks to heighten student engagement with the project through physical expression and performance: utilising more of the students’ senses than just vision and hearing.
Diana Laurillard’s theories of conversational frameworks (2002) are used to interrogate the act of dramatic performance as an act of learning, with particular reference to the serendipitous activities of design. Such interrogation highlights the feedback mechanisms that facilitate intrinsic feedback and fast, if not instantaneous, cycles of learning. The physical act of performance itself provides a learning experience that is not replicable in other modes of delivery. Student feedback data and independent assessment of project outcomes are used to assess the success of this studio model.

The relationships between various cognitive characteristics and design creativity provide the necessity for consideration for design education. It can be argued that constructive perception ability that combines perception and conception and basic ability in visual reasoning composed of visual analysis, synthesis and representation in iterative nature are equally related with creative design ability.
In a large study that was conducted to develop a test of spatial ability, subject matter experts (SMEs), drawn from both industry and academe, identified a number of subtests relevant to specific spatial skills required by designers. Spatial ability is a construct generally considered to comprise of several spatial factors often called elements or components. However, the literature is divided on the number and how best to describe them. In a lead-in study to the larger study, 194 design students took part in a trial to evaluate a number of these subtests which were being considered for the larger test. The interest in subtests was part of the process of establishing spatial factors. The performance of novice designers on three of these subtests is reported in this paper.
The three subtests were ranked highly by the SMEs. The first measured 2D to 3D concepts (BR), the second was concerned with mental rotation (MR) and the third assessed the ability to visualize sectional views (MC). The results of the trial demonstrated that design students were not competent in the skills measured by these subtests with performances falling below expectations. Mean scores achieved were 57% (BR), 53% (MR) and 49% (MC). In view of the importance of spatial ability to the design process, there are implications from these results for design education. The methodology used and possible explanations for these findings are discussed. Recommendations to improve performance are also suggested.

This paper focuses on two grounded narratives that form part my recent ethnographic study of creativity in art and design education. The investigation was culturally situated in the final year of schooling in an art and design classroom. It focused on how the students and their teacher navigated the making of temporal and digital works for the high stakes New South Wales (NSW) Visual Arts Higher School Certificate (HSC) examination. Framed by Bourdieu’s concepts of the habitus and symbolic capital, the narratives reveal how self and collective misrecognition works towards shoring up the originality of the works, while contributing to the recognition that all desire.

Initiated in 2004, The Summer Program in Architecture at The University of Hong Kong is aimed towards Form 5 – 7 level students, who are considering architecture as a future career. The challenge is to teach design and creativity to a secondary education level audience with minimum to none previous experience and encourage them to choose this path as well as the particular institution for their further education. It is believed that the more crucial problem is to develop a content that serves as an awakening for students and an alternative to what is known as “spoon-feeding education”, that is dominating China. To be applied over the course of three weeks, an entirely new content is developed that has origins on six basic perception levels of space and how these levels can be investigated progressively. This idea further developed into refinement of a versatile, three-pillar system through extraction of workshop and lecture topics based on studio. By adding content on history, landscape architecture, cinema, performing arts, fashion, etc., the program intentionally enabled students to position themselves and architecture in a broader context and also create an opportunity for multidisciplinary collaboration within faculty as well as Hong Kong creative community.
Aside from promoting the inter-disciplinary relations, a methodology of non-didactical teaching and knowledge sharing is also applied, to encourage students to establish their very own vision of architecture. This has further enhanced with additional in-studio methods, enabling students to learn through experiment.
These strategies created a highly motivated, self-paced but intensive design studio environment as a result. Based on total number of participants, exit interviews and evaluations, the attendance increased around 20% and the overall effectiveness/satisfaction rating of program nears to 95%.

Education of animation professionals is increasingly part of the mandate for university education due to digital media technology improvements and „edutainment‟ industry growth. The animation studio is intricately linked to film content production and online communications systems for advertising. This paper explores some aspects of the most successful methods for the education of postgraduate digital media producers, in particular for the study of animation and the fostering of creative innovation. It examines commonalities and differences between three institutions in Europe from an Australian perspective. A common institutional mission statement claim is the development of creative individuals who are able to augment a company‟s potential for innovation. Variables such as funding, enrolment, staffing, facilities, programs and pedagogy in relation to creativity are discussed in a rapidly changing international context using interviews with key personnel in France, UK and Germany.

Storytelling (Collins and Cooper, 1997) is one of major techniques for design inspiration. Designers often convert their design concepts into a narrative-like media for inspiration. The imagination is the key element to make storytelling an interesting and creative process. Storytelling is also one of major activities for childhood due to its direct interaction with audience. In addition, drawing is another often conducted activity of children (Cristina et al., 2009). By combining these two activities, teaching design to children might be the way to use storytelling to inspiration on certain design features such as layout design, and then provide a valid studying target for design education research.
General speaking, hand drawing, some called sketches, are the major visualization for children to visualize their own imagination. By incrementally drawing/sketching, children develop their stories and further tell the story. Traditionally, with limitation of media, such kind of story is static and hard to communicate with others during the drawing process unless the drawings are finished. In addition, the storytelling process with teachers involved is tended to be wordy or only children-listening activity. Sharing in storytelling and sharing in story creation provide a valid communication mechanism (Cassell, 2004). Therefore, for sharing the storytelling process of children, the tool mentioned above need to support the sharing activity of storytelling that combines both drawing and storytelling process.
The methodology conducted in this research is to explore the storytelling activities in a field study on seven groups of teacher-students including kindergartens and elementary schools. Along with cases studies on mediated storytelling design projects, this research develops a tool called AniStory using Java language and empirical studies are conducted using AniStory.

One of the most difficult potential misunderstandings to which conflicts between the real world and academe give rise, relates to the nature of success and failure. Arguably this is especially heightened in applied design disciplines such as architecture.
In assuring equity in assessment, the University focuses its attention emphatically on the calibration of marks. This emphasis, so readily taken up by most students, masks the conundrum that the semantic opposite of failure is not a „pass‟ but success. If marks were a meaningful metric, we would all understand that the student who obtains 50% in a course probably knows either half as much as they should, or worse, half-knows what they should. That outcome no more represents successful learning in the University, than it does a measure of success in the real world.
At the core of learning about architectural design are assumptions about the virtues of risk taking and exploration. Such behaviour can only be encouraged in an environment where the students know that they are protected from the consequences of failure. Arguably, this includes the prerogative to reward what Glen Murcutt once called „magnificent failure‟; but to do so requires that the „teacher‟ is empowered to exercise judgment of heightened subjectivity.
The paper expands on these issues, reporting on surveyed student feedback, and including an example of the author‟s own coursework. In the most general sense, effective learning is best served by recognizing failure, and having the opportunity to overcome it. To do so, we must strip the term „failure‟ of its acquired threatening connotations, and reinstate it as an expected but transitory experience within a sound learning theory. In effect, the paper argues for a different learning contract, which more appropriately challenges, protects and rewards students.

“The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.” Paul Cezanne (Nicholsen 2002: 67)
The philosopher Nietzsche, writing at the fin-de-siecle predicted that morality would gradually “perish” over “the next two centuries” (O’Leary 2002: 1). From the 1970’s, Milton Friedman’s neo-liberal capitalism dramatically shortened Nietzsche’s prediction by ushering in the era of globalization that liquidated morality with greed (Klein 2007), exponentially accelerating ecological destruction leading to the current holocaust of Nature (Ponting 2007). The ideologies of science and capitalism have alienated humans from Nature through techniques of objectification, deadening our sensuous encounter with the lifeworld by making it a specimen, a commodity or a theme park, erasing our moral connection to Mother Earth. NOW is the time to teach ecological ethics. For the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, the most famous proponent of experiential education, ethics can be developed within the experiences of art making or designing, versus meta or deontological ethics which teaches ethics as principles abstracted from reality (e.g. the Kantian tradition of formal duty ethics). Dewey’s pedagogical ideas are derived from the virtue ethics of Aristotle, particularly the notion of “phronesis” or practical wisdom where ethics is interwoven in thought as action. Michel Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” - noting that aesthetics (from Baumgarten) means sensual thinking - develops phronesis by exploring how ethics evolves through shifts in ways of being in the existential struggle between truth and ideology. Working with but recrafting Foucault’s aesthetics of existence, and influenced by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux, this paper will discuss ecological ethics taught in an architecture design course that materialises key ideas from organic architecture, phenomenology and ecological philosophy (e.g. spirit, intersubjectivity, wildness) through exercises in embodied and synaesthetic thinking (organic sculptures, material studies or model making) leading to an ontological ethics. By reorienting students to an embodied, primordial experiencing of organic reality and awakening their bodies pacified by technology and spirits anesthetized by alienation to the presence and aliveness of numinous Nature, allows them to transcend their historically inherited amnesia toward the lifeworld by returning architecture thinking to Nature as experienced as part of the self. An ecological aesthetics of existence uncovers ethics from a “felt sense of right” where empathy and caring for Nature animate ways of phenomenal knowing and designing attuned to intuitive practices of living that reciprocally transform being and reality.

We describe here our experience and thoughts on teaching generative design to design students. Many schools of Architecture and Design are now teaching generative design along with computer aided design and digital fabrication. Though this technology is still in its infancy, and the design philosophies and work practices are yet to be developed; its adaptation by design schools in the last few years has been nothing short of spectacular. The sheer exuberance of forms generated by this new process is unfortunately overshadowing some of the key understanding and frame works that need to be developed and taught at the same time. This is one of the rare cases where adaptation of a technology is happening well before the development of theoretical frameworks, posing some significant challenges to design educators.
We attempted to develop a frame work for teaching the philosophy and methods using a set of exercises aimed at developing generative designs skills in a way that can be used in the practice of Industrial Design and Architecture. The course was based on a particular implementation of generative design and was taught over a period of two week as master class in the University of South Australia to students from Industrial Design and Architecture. Students were introduced to Genoform which is generative plug-in for SolidWorks and they used Pepkura to fabricate the designs using laser cutting. The aim was to take the students from conception to fabrication using generative design as a comprehensive design method.

intuition… dawning… realization… insight… recognition… epiphany… revelation… inspiration… eureka…
In the development of a design, there are numerous decisions to be made. Many of those decisions are driven by the need to balance competing agendas, and to assign values to widely differing aspects. The development of a successful scheme will usually include decisions made analytically step-by-step, but also regularly requires that a designer is able to recognize and accommodate opportunities as they arise.
The ‘Design Epiphany’ represents such a moment of recognition – it is an important juncture that allows the designer to perceive a potential way forward, a resolution of a conflict, or an opportunity for further refinement of a design. As the designer works toward a proposal, there may be many ‘epiphanies’, some more fruitful than others.
The moment of Epiphany is considered within a number of fields. In essence, it describes a moment when a new perspective appears (often ‘suddenly’) to someone engaged in a particular search. The high contrast between the apparently tiny effort, and the value and impact of the new perspective is fascinating. The hint of a brush with The Divine lends an aura of mystery, and suggests Approval.
To investigate the Design Epiphany, this paper surveys recent writing and research on the Epiphany as a neurological phenomenon, as a mechanism within creative production, as a phenomenological experience investigated in psychology, a cultural construct, and a myth. It considers the role and nature of Epiphany within several disciplines, and specifically in relation to a Co-Evolutionary model of design. The paper concludes with notes on further investigation of the Design Epiphany and its application within design education.