The social designer: a narrative vignette of lived experience in design teaching and supervision

Abstract

The poster discusses a section in a series of vignettes which I researched as part of my doctoral dissertation. Reflecting on a decade of teaching design, a space was opened up –a liminal and in-between space- which enabled me to re-examine the design landscape, including my teaching and personal experiences as a creative practitioner. Limen invited various moments, memories, ideas and concepts to be braided together so I could re-connect with my passion for teaching (paraphrasing Breen 2003:162) and creative expression. I lived with questions in the study about the rationale for teaching students design. Traditionally a consumption-driven discipline, it is characterised by change and complexity but increasingly also by the sustainability discourse. Surface Design equally, is an elusive field to define. In this paper it is framed to bring a more holistic, if at times ephemeral measure to the work of design. Conceptual, applied or vocational, it stands firmly rooted in the traditions of art and of craft, with the concomitant ‘higher order thinking’ typical of design and its digital processes (Craft and Design Inquiry 2010). In this vignette I explore personal creative practice (and doing design) as a central aspect in theorizing design and in teaching/supervising in the form of life writing, poetry, collagraph and film.

The need to renew my own imaginative and creative base in art and design as research method became urgent as I developed the parallel layers of reflecting on teaching and writing about supervision. Doing design and art is different to theorizing design and art. I had to get my hands dirty and do: draw, make marks, etch, make prints, do imaginative field work. From this biographical point of view, by being both the researcher and the researched, as described by Heydon (2010), I filtered questions through the sieve of living them. Initial findings indicate that from an embodied perspective, facilitating the unfolding nature of design is more reliant on the lecturer/supervisor as active creative practitioner and researcher than it is on her expertise and content knowledge of the given design discipline.