Gerald van Dijk, University of Applied Sciences, & Remke Klapwijk, TU Delft, The Netherlands
Are you introducing your preservice teachers to ‘Design and Technology pedagogies’ in which pupils work with real clients? During these authentic design processes, communication between the students and their client is crucial. For both parties it is not always easy to communicate and they need training. In this blogpost we will share some crucial aspects that makes communication between a designer and a client successful, and we discuss how the analysis of examples can help your students to become better communicators of design ideas.
Authentic design tasks
In ‘D&T-like’ educational practices, students increasingly design for authentic clients. A client can be a potential user, a real customer for the product, or a company or an organisation with a certain need. The benefits can be that the student works for real people with real needs, which is often motivating. However, this brings about a lot of complexity. The client may have a busy agenda, or may not fully understand what can be expected of a student, etc. It is also not easy to come to an understanding of what a client wants. So how do designers conduct such ‘dialogues’ with clients?
Design dialogue
A design dialogue can be seen as a ‘genre’. It is important that preservice teachers understand that this genre differs from other genres , just like a thriller differs from a poem, and this needs specific communication training. If the pupils as young designers don’t master the genre, they may end up with design ideas that are not in the client’s interest. In our research we explored the characteristics of design dialogues from literature and by observations. What we found, for instance, is that design dialogues are:
Emotional: the designers’ heart and mind is in it, which can make feedback on a prototype hard to digest.
Multimodal: designers use text, specialized drawings, 3D models and even gestures to communicate design ideas.
Persuasive: designers need to convince the client of the value of their design ideas.
Ambiguous: designers need to communicate uncertainty. This is because a design problem can have many solutions, and the designer and the client need to explore these solutions together.
Moreover, designers across different fields use different tools during such dialogues. A web designer may want to talk about a ‘user journey’ for a website, whereas that is of no concern for the software designer who wants to design a certain functionality into a program.
Learning to communicate design ideas
So, if design dialogues are important and complex, how do we adjust D&T pedagogy to arrive at more authentic design practices in schools?
For starters, it would help if teachers talk to designers in different fields and ask them how they go about design dialogues. Alternatively, search the internet for designers presenting their ideas in a video - click here for an example (written texts are in Dutch).
Designers often use a specific structure to present design ideas. Usually, they first explain the problem from the perspective of the users and then present the solution. By showing and analyzing video’s using this structure, students will become better in presenting their intermediate designs. It also helps novice designers to think in a more designerly way. There are two tools available: piecing together a design pitch and the solution pitch
Design Tools catalogue with video clips
In another research that we did, we helped teachers and students by presenting them with a catalogue of 30 video clips, each clip demonstrating one characteristic of design dialogues (van Dijk et al., 2021). We chose to record these dialogues in school based situations, across a variety of design practices (architecture/building construction, web design, industrial design), to make the clips recognizable for students.
The clips were made of dialogues halfway a design process. At this stage a designer has some models on the table, showing preliminary ideas that can be discussed with the client. This sets the stage for dialogues that can bolster design competencies. These clips could be used to demonstrate design dialogues to preservice teachers, and they, in turn, could use them to model design dialogues for their pupils in their own classes.
Moreover, the catalogue of video clips can be used in class, to stimulate discussions about strengths and weaknesses of the designers’ role during the dialogue. Do these designers really stimulate feedback by the client on their preliminary ideas, and how do they go about feedback that is given? Do they give convincing arguments to their client? Are sketches and prototypes used in a functional way? How do they make sure that clear conclusions are drawn from the discussion, and properly written down for later use? Students are well able to discuss such things with their teacher, and the text that comes with each clip facilitates such discussions. In D&T teacher education the same can be done to increase awareness of important characteristics of design dialogues.
As a key-take away, be aware that different genres of design dialogues exist and that over the years you can develop awareness of the characteristics of these, so you’ll increasingly be able to share this awareness with pre-service teachers. The catalogue with the design dialogue clips is only available in Dutch, but if you have a look, you’ll still get the idea. It would be great if a similar catalogue could be developed with examples in English. Also, research is needed that answers the question how teachers can use such resources in class to bolster design competencies for their students. How great would it be to conduct such research internationally!
Sources to use in class
English tools for students on the structure of design presentations can be viewed at Design tools (tudelft.nl)
The catalogue (see blue menu to the end of the page for the clips) can be found at https://ontwerptaal.nl
For further reading, see literature at the end of this page at https://ontwerptaal.nl/theorie/
References
van Dijk, G., Klapwijk, R. ., Smit, J., Savelsbergh, E., Dirks, L., & Kuiper, C. (2021). Fostering Creative Design Dialogue: A Research Based Online Catalogue of Video Clips. Techne Series - Research in Sloyd Education and Craft Science A, 28(2), pp.100–109. Retrieved from https://journals.oslomet.no/index.php/techneA/article/view/4339
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