Abstract:

Project based learning and specifically the use of scenarios has long been of interest to educators. It has been widely recognized that simulating real world situations is an effective way for students to acquire the necessary knowledge, the appropriate responses and the required assurance in the context of professional training. It was thus in this direction that the author turned for inspiration in creating a simulated design competition in which students play various roles in order to understand and master the concepts that underlie designer-client relationships. After more than fifteen years experience giving the Professional Practice course to graduating class students of an Industrial Design undergraduate programme, the author sought a way to better expose students to the dynamics of the client-designer relationship, particularly in the context of negotiating a first contract. After experimenting other pedagogical techniques with only moderate success, the author turned to scenarios and role playing : the simulation of a design competition based on the generally accepted rules governing closed competitions proposed by various national and international professional design societies.

In the first phase of the scenario, groups of five or six students each imagine a company whose commercial activity calls into play various dimensions of the design discipline. Taking on the roles of administrative officers (a president and various vice-presidents), they determine the nature of their enterprise, its area of entrepreneurial activity, its history, its competitive environment, its mission and values, etc. In short, they describe a fictitious commercial entity with as much credible detail as possible. Once created, each company then proposes a new product or service that it wishes to develop, a project which requires the services of a design consultant that will be selected by means of a closed design competition.

In the second phase of the scenario, students shed their previous roles to become individual designers, each one receiving an invitation to participate in a design competition and compete for a coveted design contract. To win the contest, they must submit the best offer in response to the call for proposals. In the third phase, students revert to their initial roles as company officers in order to evaluate the proposals submitted in their competition and ultimately chose a winner.

All documents created in course of the scenario, descriptions of the commercial entities and their respective design projects, call for proposals dans fees proposals are held in a secure and confidential server space using Web Dépôt, a web based file repository provided by the Université de Montréal. Thanks to detailed control over reading and writing permissions in Web Dépôt, the author is able to incorporate the concept of anonymity in the relationship between competition promoters and participants. This ensures unbiased judging of the submissions by the companies by hiding designers’ identities.

Over a nine week period, this elaborate scenario plunges students into a participatory experience bringing into play several key concepts related to the professional practice of design while allowing them to express their creativity both in the elaboration of credible commercial environments as well as in their responses to the professional challenges generated by this environment.

Keywords:

Educational scenario, project based learning, design education.