Abstract:

This article narrates on the process of a new constructionist curriculum that was launched on 2016. It was based on expected designers’ “elastic mind” (Antonelli 2009) that would allow participants (lecturers and students) to adapt quickly to the accelerated instantiation of artefacts and behavior that measure industrial design success today. The program presented a cultural and epistemological change from learning by skill transmission to learning by social and experiential transformation and expansion. It followed up on Bauhaus, Ulm and Malmo while moving further than Dewey’s learning-by-doing (hands-on, pragmatic, reflective learning) to Papert’s (1991) constructionism (situated project-based learning building and internalizing new knowledge structures), and more recent industrial design manifestations of the open school movement. Particularly aligning with critical pedagogy (Freire 1970), critical design and critical making as material speculations that reconnect the conceptual, linguistic, physical and digital in an act of knowing, discussing and thinking with artefacts. Critical design was about prototyping artefacts that challenge everyday affirmative design (products that reinforce status quo) to query efficiency, optimization of products and social norm. Consequentially pushing users into new experiences and spaces of knowledge and development (Dunne and Raby 1999, 2001). Critical making meant the workshop scaffolding successions of prototypes as witness of an iterative process (Ratto 2008, 2011). It focused on constructionist process of making by reconnecting critical thinking (abstract, explicit, internal cognitive and linguistic) with making (material, tacit, embodied, external and community-oriented). On this predicament, computers were also thought as materials to intervene with coding, more than just using them like consumer-like tools as with Photoshop representation or SolidWorks drafting. STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and design, and mathematics) principles for over STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) supported participants to implement CDIO (conceiving, designing, implementing and operating) framework that was promoted by Engineering Australia. This approach validated design by probing and proving practically how it is implemented and operates within context and users rather than considering design as done at concept proposal stage.

Keywords:

Design Education, Constructionism, Critical Design, Critical Making.