Presenter and Panelist at 2024 UCDA Design Education Summit: Immerse

Presenter

Personal Agency: A Starting Point for Scoping BFA Capstone Projects: One of the most critical moments for Graphic Design BFA students is completing their final capstone project. This project can be the first time a student fully defines a problem, condition, or state. The first time, they fully scope, outline, or establish a process and timeline for project execution. It can also be the first time they fully realize independent research, original content creation, functional prototyping, and public presentation. Defining a topic or individual starting point can be overwhelming with such complex needs. But by starting with the unique positionality of the individual student—exploring their agency—they can easily define the content and work they are best equipped to create.

This presentation will outline a method and process to help students define their agency. It will explain how individual life experiences can guide students in connecting their work to more significant social or cultural contexts. It will present strategies and techniques to connect personal experience with primary and secondary research. It will present ways for students to define who they will partner or collaborate with—a group, a cause, or a speculative future. It will provide case studies where students activate preferred mediums—providing portfolio material specific to their unique human perspective. Overall, it will present a pedagogical approach that supports and allows students to immerse themselves in developing projects reflective of their future impact.

Panelist

Design Workshops as Transformative Teaching Tool: The potential for participatory and co-design methodologies to shape creative processes is undeniable and students of all levels have an increasing need to master these tools . As the design discipline continues to evolve and become increasingly collaborative, educators are responsible for preparing students by cultivating a “responsiveness to change” (Abdullah & Crisp, 2018). Students must navigate uncertainty and become comfortable with “postulating, guessing, hypothesizing, conjecturing, and testing their theories” (Ghassan & Bohemia, 2013). Adopting a pedagogical approach that disrupts the idiosyncratic design culture and focusing on these “soft skills” students are positioned to address new challenges or “wicked problems” while generating collaboration, fostering creativity and encouraging divergent thinking.

This paper brings together diverse voices from design education to examine the precedents and methodologies informing design workshops, a tool for disrupting the status quo of design education. Ambiguous in nature, open-ended, and self-directed, workshops create low-stakes conditions for iterative and experimental outcomes dealing with uncertainty. Inherently participatory, workshops serve as dynamic frameworks in which educators and students engage in collaborative ideation, hands-on activities, iterative prototyping, and group decision-making. Some students come out of design school without the ability to be a problem solver and problem creator. They are often fixated on the creation of fixed artifacts and solutions. Workshops are uniquely positioned to develop transferable skills in students, providing them with agile tools that transcend traditional design education focused on visual aesthetics and branding based skills that are increasingly in competition with quickly emerging technologies.

Moreover, many educators agree that workshops offer opportunities for introducing new and emerging technologies to students, tools which are driving the future of design practice. Incorporating tinkering, play, and gamification can foster creativity and encourage exploration by lessening the fear of “doing it wrong.” Integrating workshops into design education underscores the importance of staying current with changing technologies and leveraging them to enhance immersive design experiences.
Furthermore, this paper aims to unravel how design workshops are framed across educational levels, from pre-college to graduate studies, by highlighting case studies and shared experiences. This group of educators will discuss how participatory design and co-design methods are incorporated into their varied pedagogical practices.

Through this exploration, the paper seeks to underscore the transformative potential of design workshops as a tool which cultivates collaborative, innovative, and immersive learning environments. By actively involving participants in the design process, these workshops empower individuals to shape their learning experiences and contribute meaningfully to the evolution of their shared knowledge within a classroom or student studio.

Panelists
The panel brought together the following designers, scholars, and educators:

• Rachael Paine, PhD, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design + Human-Centered Design at Virginia Tech University (Chair)
• Bree McMahon, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at University of Arkansas
• Jenn Stucker, Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Bowling Green State University
• Johnathon Strube, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at East Tennessee State University
• Piper Schuerman, MDes Candidate at University of Arkansas