Research

Summary page

Research

Creating place: Design education as vocational education and training

There is an air of mystique attached to being a 'designer', one that can occasionally distort our view of design as a world of work. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the paraprofessional level, where 'design' courses offered through the vocational education and training (VET) sector confront the tensions between the personas of the 'artisan as craftsperson' and the creative designer. This level of VET is most certainly vocational preparation, but it also represents the threshold for recognition as a design professional.

The Australian design sector represents a diverse collection of creative and innovative industries and broadly includes areas such as architecture, engineering, graphic design and digital media, industrial design, furniture, footwear, fashion and interior design. Recently the sector has included design management as a key discipline that seeks to utilise design principles and practices to improve business operations and present design as a strategic tool for use across industries and enterprises. Therefore, how new designers are prepared for new ways of thinking and working in the changing world of work is an important issue.

The professional ranks of the design sector have traditionally been filled by university-qualified practitioners such as architects, engineers and industrial designers. However, changes in the sector are driving a need for enhanced design skills from VET graduates, particularly at the certificate IV to advanced diploma levels of the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). Here we have traditionally seen a demarcation between professionals and other design workers which is based largely on the level of design qualification attained; historically, a university degree was seen as the basis for recognition as a professional designer. As levels of conceptual knowledge and problemsolving approaches are increasingly utilised at the paraprofessional level, this division is becoming blurred, thus posing a challenge to existing frameworks for teaching and learning in VET, particularly in the design and delivery of higher-level qualifications (certificate IV through to advanced diploma).

The central themes of this project emerged from participant views about the suitability of competency-based training and national training packages for the teaching of design. As these issues have been on the VET agenda since the early 1990s, we fully expected them to be somewhat redundant by 2007 and assumed we would be working from a stable base to launch an investigation into creative, innovative practice and associated teaching methods.

This proved not to be the case and meant that the research was diverted from one of its original questions, that of what the educational practices of the designer might offer management education, including, in particular, the capacity to cast a critical eye over problems and reinvigorate existing practices. However, as design educators told us, their 'critical eye' has been very often focused on massaging educational practices into uncomfortable shapes to fit (usually awkwardly) into regulated frameworks centred on assessment and record-keeping.

A generous interpretation might be that this activity in itself is 'innovative practice'; however, that was not the tenor of the data collected. Hence we took on new directions in the research, based on the evidence of resistance to move past the issues of how to better align existing practices to the requirements of a competency framework.

Through a national online survey and state-based focus groups this research presents the perceptions of over 200 hundred stakeholders in design education in the VET sector, primarily at the certificate IV to advanced diploma levels. The focus groups were directed by issues emerging from the survey. The majority of participants were design educators working in the sector (predominantly in technical and further education [TAFE] institutes). Researcher field notes and forum reports were added to textual data for analysis.

There was a genuine interest in innovation by participants, with a parallel reluctant compliance to what was expressed as often restrictive teaching and learning practices. While some practitioners viewed this compliance as similar to working within the constraints of a project brief and therefore part of the design process, others suggested that a regulated system was inconsistent with professional, creative practice for designers. Working with competency-based training remained a dominant theme throughout. The general discussion, while not overwhelmingly negative, reflected more the concerns of the stakeholders about 'getting it right' in their diverse yet closely related fields of endeavour.

The notion of design practices articulating into management education need further investigation. However, it is well established in the data that the principles and processes of design practice are complementary to current and emerging management practice. This project was limited in that it did not discretely identify and engage a larger number of relevant management practitioners, as it did design educators. That said, the study remained well informed about management issues relevant to the identified paraprofessional contexts.

It is an interesting outcome of the research that we are left with a sense of 'going back to the future' to innovate. Our initial reaction was that practitioners were resistant to change. However, as the research progressed and became more widely informed, it became apparent that their desire to return to established pedagogies of design practice was driven by the understanding that these time-proven approaches are the fertile ground for innovation and creativity. In the end, the initial questions of the project became secondary to the very real issues identified by the participants. The research has consolidated a view that design education is deeply committed to problem-based and studio-based approaches to learning, but is operating awkwardly in a competency-based training framework.