FRAMEWORK FOR IPEDISING HIGHER EDUCATION: NEW MAKERS CULTURE FOR TRANSFORMATIVE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION

This paper builds upon a previous presentation at ICERI 2013 relating to new digital technologies influence on tertiary education sector. It keeps redefining new disciplinary and academic literacies to stay abreast of change. Recent research shows contrary to common view that youth are digital natives, experienced and willing to adopt new technology as they encounter problems when required to walk on areas of higher-level thinking; they just keep to superficial levels of usage instead. The challenge to education is greater now that life and learning are multi-dimensional, multi-modal and distributed.

This is particularly visible in fields that require making artifacts and innovation instead of using technology passively. For instance, industrial design was traditionally thought to assist increasing production and consumption through mechanical or process innovation. The profession leans on a long legacy of craftsmanship and making. However old-style constraints and measures of success seem to be challenged by recent developments in technology.

This presentation extends on new digital technologies as they are also impacting the material culture of design. The advent of a new incarnation of makers, initially represented by affordable 3D rapid prototyping and associated software, has brought about the need to query the profession. There are a number of societal and cultural implications affecting our designers’ role as change makers. Technology is delivering cheaper and more efficient devices and communication. Democratization on means of production is on the increase and designers cannot longer claim control by positioning themselves as the expert elite who provides stylish services to a mass of consumers in a naïve market. Learning from history, graphic design and desktop publishing were greatly affected when computing industry expanded into a new niche of home market back in 1990s. Additionally, globalisation increased competition when cheaper services based on lower labor costs were offered from elsewhere. Now technology is also forcing similar changes in industrial design.

Many design courses focus on design thinking while still falling short from reflecting current professional circumstances. They still need to overcome the paradox of preparing creative “world-class subject-matter experts who too often lack commercial aptitude,’ ‘graduates often have little or no idea of how a company works, and how they could fit in. The cost: too many great technological ideas are squandered as their creators have little to no idea how to express their inventions”. It is said designers have difficulty on breaking away from isolationism and lack of analysis, contextual and historical inquiry, abstraction and theory, writing and reading, process thinking, understanding of science, etc. The author proposes a framework of “makers-thinkers-enactors-enablers” for a new breed of designers. A new design discourse that considers first, previous boundaries that are now blurred. Second, how constrains and freedoms are shifting places. Third, the act of extended creation between designers and users in a process of co-making and open design. Examples on methodology and implementation of that framework are provided to grow design expertise from traditional skillsets onto new competencies for the new age. The paper also moves onto recommendations on transformative curriculum development based on a current course renewal in process of implementation.