‘Time to Be an Academic Influencer’

This paper explores how Peer-to-Peer learning can level-up students' understanding of computer-aided design (CAD) with Autodesk Auto- CAD programme for Interior Design Year 1 students. As students come from different knowledge backgrounds, they approach the module with different understanding levels, with the weaker students unable to follow the live demonstration tutorials. A peer tutoring assignment using a student-led peer-to-peer learning pedagogy, was introduced to advance students' understanding and internalise content better by reinforcing their learning. Each group has an equal proportion of students with different levels of knowledge and capabilities, and each group member conducted self-research on a topic segment, shared their knowledge and findings within their group, and thereafter curated a 15-minute lecture and facilitation workshop for peers. Tutors provided consultation and mediation, encouraging students’ participation. The assignment’s results showed that the peer-to-peer learning approach efficaciously empowered students and motivated learning, enabling them to be self-directed learners.

Bringing Home Recursions

This report is about an explorative co-crafting course applying the notion of recursive publics to adult learning and pro-environmental activation, which aimed to engage a diverse cohort of learners towards patterns of eating, living, and engaging that promoted wellbeing and a healthy environment. This two-month-long, university-endorsed study in Hong Kong saw 22 participants fermenting their urine in which to grow an edible plant (Lactuca sativa), thereby creating a material relationship between their bodies and the environment. Technologies were employed to bring people physically together for greater emancipatory engagement inside the shared material condition. When analyzed, these technologies revealed their potential for opening or restricting the synergies from combined purpose, expertise, and immanent life processes in recursively profound and playful ways. This civic-tech study offers a recursive self-implication approach to design education as a collective negotiation process for navigating unknown territory to converge a myriad of expertise and intended beneficiaries.

Facilitating Tacit Knowledge Construction

Design knowledge, for its most part, is tacit. The embedded and inherent nature of tacit knowledge implies that it is a cognitive and internal construct acquired through the design act of doing. However, it is also socially constructed through shared experiences, collaborations and interactions. The design studio is a dynamic, pedagogical site that facilitates the construction of tacit knowledge through its myriad of interactive spaces. Online and virtual platforms offer opportunities to extend the learning boundaries of its social realm. Studies in the influence of these spaces on tacit knowledge construction are currently insufficient. An interpretive study was conducted in different studio environments within the Environment and Interior Design discipline of the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to further the understanding of tacit knowledge construction in blended learning environments.

Service-Learning Education Integrated Design Education Through a Design- Build Focus

Different from the conventional design-built projects, the service-learning educational model represents a student led community driven education process. This photos essay delivers evidence, spanning 15 years and various contexts, demonstrating the impact of service learning and its dependency on cross-disciplinary skills. Beyond the social value, service learning fosters a series of interpersonal and professional relationships, amplifying skills and education value outside of the classroom.

The Pandemic and This Issue of Design Education

When we first initiated a call for this issue on design education, never could we have imagined or foreseen what lay ahead. Since late 2019, Hong Kong has gone through an enormously difficult time. First, spikes of social unrest, rapidly followed by COVID-19. Half of the first semester of the 2019 – 2020 academic year, as skirmishes closed in on The Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus, all courses had to move over to available and often misunderstood online platforms. As the situation finally subsided, the virus emerged, impacting the commencement of the second semester, and the overall delivery modes of a structured curriculum for an entire year. Both faculty and students of the School of Design lived and worked in high hopes to return to faceto- face teaching sooner, rather than later. In time, hope conceded to a stark reality that online, the virtual and the digital models of education, have moved into focus as the main and primary modes of education. Long gone are the days of the digital as a mere supplemental or peripheral possibility. The digital reality presented other challenges to design education: ensuring credible and authentic outcomes for each of the design disciplines within a non-studio setting, the expression of ideas, or demonstrating principles across and through digital platforms with the additional burdens of a digital generation that instantaneously become camera shy. Or, in the extreme the mistrust shown by students that reviewers may not understand the design work without a physical presence. Moving one year forward, the growing pains of digital pedagogies has caused an instantaneous maturing of educators, those being educated, and of what is said, shown and discussed. Somehow, the global body of design environments have collectively responded to these and more local challenges, yet again transforming the specifics of digital pedagogies across unexplored territories. The following series of images attest to the resilience of digital pedagogies and design institutions. May this stand as a testament to rapid responses, individuals who took the reins, and how educators shape the future of design, design-research and ultimately how design is carried forward across generations.

Studio In-Situ

This photo essay explores the possibility of radically shifting the understanding of the design studio as a spatial construct. By considering the seven-year evolution of a (socalled) design-build project known as the Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms, it recognises the possibility of dislocating the design studio from its traditionally centralised space in the academy and moving it to the site of its investigation or intervention for the duration of a project. The Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms aimed to improve water and sanitation infrastructure in a severely under-resourced informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, through the insertion of small permanent public spaces. Due to a number of reasons, including the physical characteristics of the sites selected for these spaces, the design studio gradually shifted its physical location to such an extent that virtually the entire design, documentation and construction process took place in-situ.

Rising to the Challenge

With the widening scope of design, the importance of the design studio has concomitantly responded by transforming its own character to become inclusive of the educational domains of history, professional practices, theories, technical, and material studies. The absorption of such domains, part-and-parcel of the studio setting, has irrevocably highlighted the importance of education within the container of the studio or rather ‘in-situ’ education. However, with the volatility of external factors, the challenges posed to design education are multiple. Especially in light of the rise of a global pandemic, educators globally have had to implement crisis strategies in response. This short visual essay outlines the obstacles of online teaching; moving from resistance to embracing the tools and features that online education provides. Sharing the gained experiences, starting at the rise of the pandemic, the text engages seven key points of interest, while practically demonstrating responses in the product design setting.

Blended Learning Strategies for Advertising Design Studies

Technological developments have brought profound challenges to design education. To understand how design educators adapt to new technological directions, this article examines student feedback from advertising design courses that apply blended learning approaches. This study identified three blended learning strategies conducive to meaningful learning: timely and meaningful feedback; engagement with real world tasks; and support from expert tutors. This article also discusses potential resistance and challenges in implementing instruction in blended technological environments.

The Role of Technology in Reforming Design Education

Design education has significantly changed since the 1950s. The era depended widely on normative models such as those proposed by Benjamin Bloom (Bloom et al. 1956) and his collaborators, which resulted in the formulation of Bloom's Taxonomy. Comprising six interchangeable layers (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) of higher and lower thinking, Bloom's taxonomy sets in place an archetypal model for education that thrives on object-driven goals. Here, pedagogical interchange and the object-driven and organised structure of education can adapt to each layer within the taxonomic structure.

Vertical Studio

Since 2016 the Environmental and Interior Design Programme (E&I), School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, has implemented an educational model called the vertical studio. Until now, the vertical studio model has become an instrumental peer-to-peer learning scheme while enhancing students' competency in digital literacy. A first of its kind within the design education context of Asia, the vertical studio model has contributed to advance design education practices, embracing collaborative learning opportunities, and facilitate knowledge and skills transfer of drawing techniques, technology, and digital proficiency.