A PROPOSAL FOR THE USE OF THREE PHASE DESIGN RESEARCH FOR DEVELOPING A DIAGNOSTIC TEACHING METHODOLOGY FOR FASHION COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN

Within developing countries many undergraduate students are not from affluent communities. Within the teaching environment many difficulties arise when students from exceedingly varied socio-economic backgrounds enter Higher Education programs and are grouped together. Often access to internet, computer terminals and specialised software is limited to class times or research centres located on the institution’s campuses. Disadvantaged students, as a result, have uneven skill levels and a lack of user embedded knowledge as their basic computer skills are rarely practiced. Overcoming these and other learning difficulties becomes the lecturer’s task, over and above his or her curriculum work and the Fashion digital design studio is not exempt from this phenomenon.

When focusing on Adobe Photoshop training for Fashion Computer Aided Design (CAD) additional issues arise. Traditional Software Instruction relies on teaching students the software program interface, tools and functions as opposed to using it appropriately in the context of their discipline. Students struggle to recall and apply the newly learned program to project work as a result. As Adobe Photoshop is not fashion specific, large parts of the program fall into disuse and accompanying textbooks and manuals see fashion students having to work through an excess of redundant information. However, Photoshop remains the most accessible and affordable alternative especially as students expect to be trained vocationally for employment in the industry following graduation – and Photoshop has become an industry standard.

The challenge arises where the lecturer is required to instruct students against the backdrop of the problems mentioned above. Curricula rarely keep up with industry requirements and the onus falls on the lecturer to employ methods and tools to adapt and change within the confines of the curriculum structure itself. Instruction should ideally take place in a manner that will aid the retention of the students’ user knowledge especially as the software program is not fashion specific and a new teaching methodology should be developed, tested and implemented.

The proliferation of students’ learning related problems might be quantifiable. However by observing, identifying and aiding the resolution of an individual’s learning problems, the lecturer is placed within a participatory anthropological, natural environment which is in contrast qualitative in nature. Appropriately this paper does not propose to merely better the current (inadequate) situation observed in the classroom as this can be equated to patching a large hole in a wheel, where the wheel has broken off the vehicle. Ideally the aim should be to create an entirely new situation addressing the students’ pre-determined and quantifiable needs based on their learning problems and as such to proverbially re-invent the wheel. Enter Design Research (DR).

Discourse regarding the 3 pre-existing phases of Design Research is provided alongside the possible solution to the problem that is to be prepared and tested within the specific domain, the proposed data that will be gathered based on the performance of the design experiment and the potential adoption or retesting of the experiment. As a result, this proposal will also provide a core debate for adapting DR as a tool for developing a diagnostic teaching methodology for use in Fashion specific Adobe Photoshop training.