Research

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Research

Creating place: Design education as vocational education and training by Damon Cartledge and Mark Watson, LaTrobe University

Design education leads to an extensive range of jobs in architecture, interior design, furniture design and textiles at both professional and paraprofessional levels. Vocational educational and training (VET) offers a considerable number of courses in the paraprofessional level of design, mostly at the certificate IV and diploma levels.

Damon Cartledge and Mark Watson's project set out to focus on two issues of design education within the VET sector. The first was how design education can encourage creativity and innovation within national training packages; the second was to determine how design principles, which are embodied within design education, can be applied to management training.

The methodology comprised a national online survey and a number of focus groups. In total, over 200 stakeholders in design education shared their perceptions with the researchers. Research by its very nature is full of uncertainties and will challenge hypotheses. In this case, the research questions were framed on the assumption that training packages had become an accepted part of design education in the VET sector. It became apparent, however, that training packages had remained an ongoing challenge with those surveyed, who were not therefore in a position to respond to the original research questions posed by the authors. The two issues of innovation and design in management training remain areas for future research.

Nevertheless, the research was not in vain. What emerges is that design education practitioners feel very strongly about the way design is taught. The view of the practitioners is that design education sits uncomfortably within a competency-based training framework, and that the time-honoured pedagogies of problem-based and studio-based approaches offer a better way to instil innovation and creativity.

This finding provides a challenge to those with the responsibility for developing training packages that incorporate design. Can training packages accommodate the aspirations of the design education practitioners? Or is it time to rethink the teaching and learning approach in this area?

Tom Karmel
Managing Director, NCVER