Visualizing design competencies, engaging the discipline

Lee VanderKooi, Assistant Professor, Herron School of Art and Design

Design practice continually struggles to respond to social, technological, and economic factors. By addressing new challenges and engaging new questions design continues to mutate, thus students poised to enter professional practice will encounter a context in flux.

Problem framing, understanding contexts, and collaborative process skills are all key competencies students must engage when solving complex “fuzzy” problems. However the skills students use to supplement their visual acuity often receive less emphasis.

Within a senior level capstone portfolio class students considered the wide range of skills and competencies that their work demonstrated. They received university wide competency statements (broad), disciplinary competency statements (narrow), and other evaluative criteria. By creating a visualization that wove design work, skills, and competencies together, each student developed a narrative embedded within her portfolio that connected to her unique professional goals.

This process leveraged students’ ability to think and learn visually, emphasizing thinking through making. Further, it connected visualizing and making skills, to planning, research, and process skills. Students gained clarity, confidence, and an ability to articulate the significance of their process and the relationship between the form, content, and context of their work.

As patterns in professional practice continue to shift the challenge to design education remains—How can students be prepared for problem solving in a complex world? Using visual strategies to help students articulate what is important about their work can deepen their understanding. Leveraging visualization to act as a bridge between form making, process, and research skills is a powerful tool to help students more effectively articulate how they are prepared to engage today’s complex challenges.