The public space of design education

Bonnie Sadler Takach, Associate Professor & Aidan Rowe, Assistant Professor (Visual Communication Design), University of Alberta.

We will present our experiences of developing, funding and conducting a pilot study to explore: a) the relevance and effectiveness of an alternative teaching and learning approach in design education; and b) the methods by which this can be evaluated. We moved a design class to a studio setting in a public space to provide an arena for collaborative discovery learning, while creating design solutions for community clients (social, cultural, and institutional). Students created PushYourDesign using design technologies and social software as tools for collaboration, communication, documentation and production, and activated the public space with their ongoing design processes and concepts.