Description
Teacher and student interaction in a design-studio setting, also referred to as tutorial-learning or learning-by-doing, has been the blueprint of design education for decades. A crucial difficulty of design education is that the content of these meetings remains remarkably implicit. In this study we propose to explore the concept of Design Grammar as an observation framework for teacher-student interactions. Design grammar can be defined as the visual language used to design, i.e., the elements, and relationships between them, that are synthesized in the Form (understood as a unified structure of parts) of an artifact. In order to make this concept operational we developed a Design Grammar Model (DGM) which explicits the different elements involved in form-giving in design. We used the DGM to analyze the content of the interactions of junior Industrial Design students. We compared the results in terms of the student and teacher’s fluency in Design Grammar (DG), the criteria to evaluate fluency was: the frequency of references to DG, variety of references and articulation of DG elements. The main insight of our study was the observation that interactions with students with lower fluency in DG resulted in poorer performances from the teacher and therefore lower quality interactions.
Keywords
Design Grammar, Design Education, Observational study
DOI
10.5703/1288284315948
Design Grammar - a pedagogical approach for observing teacher and student interaction.
Teacher and student interaction in a design-studio setting, also referred to as tutorial-learning or learning-by-doing, has been the blueprint of design education for decades. A crucial difficulty of design education is that the content of these meetings remains remarkably implicit. In this study we propose to explore the concept of Design Grammar as an observation framework for teacher-student interactions. Design grammar can be defined as the visual language used to design, i.e., the elements, and relationships between them, that are synthesized in the Form (understood as a unified structure of parts) of an artifact. In order to make this concept operational we developed a Design Grammar Model (DGM) which explicits the different elements involved in form-giving in design. We used the DGM to analyze the content of the interactions of junior Industrial Design students. We compared the results in terms of the student and teacher’s fluency in Design Grammar (DG), the criteria to evaluate fluency was: the frequency of references to DG, variety of references and articulation of DG elements. The main insight of our study was the observation that interactions with students with lower fluency in DG resulted in poorer performances from the teacher and therefore lower quality interactions.
Comments
This conference presentation was developed into a book chapter that was published in “Analyzing Design Review Conversations,” edited by Robin S. Adams and Junaid A. Siddiqui (2016, Purdue University Press), which can be found here:http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/analyzing-design-review-conversations.