Abstract:

Through the history, living creatures have been learning, one way or the other; this is an imaginable fact. Human beings, through humankinds’ minds, have qualitatively advanced miraculous cognitive devices that can even recognize and represent consciously what they learn. We think it is reasonable to imagine that we have discovered this blessed property and had begun to use the knowledge representation of other minds. Thus, we probably had gotten the idea of teaching. In the course of history, humans have been establishing some teaching and learning systems; education. We should probably begin to clarify what these are. It seems inevitable to start a discussion about education with the fundamental constituting elements of it. We will therefore explain our understanding of “knowledge”, “learning”, “teaching” and “creativity” to clarify our experience in research driven by teaching.

In the Faculty of Architecture in Delft University of Technology, the core of our approach regarding education in design is to provide students self-learning skills which lead them to life-long continuous learning.

Our experience has also taught us to make research in some essential subjects, such as: - cognitive structure of learning and teaching, - empathy, - Socratic Method, - re-thinking of the traditional methods and the content of the domains, - new methods and techniques, - monitoring the changing approaches in the field, etc. to deepen in a better, effective and ‘creative’ education. These issues will be treated, accordingly.

This is our ongoing research; above mentioned issues come back to us as reflection and we keep working on it to improve its quality. This mutual reflection between students and us vary depending on their previous education. Some began with design education directly after high school and the others, different higher education. Empathy is one of the key operations that all the teachers should posses to have an access to different minds with other background.

Finally, educators can be most fruitful if and only if they keep learning to develop themselves and their teaching methods.

Keywords:

Design, analysis, method, research, education, training, knowledge, knowledge representation, creativity, defamiliarization.