Improving design education by international collaboration, traditional skillsets, discovery and ubiquitous learning

This paper reports on a project primarily run from a third year industrial design studio unit at University of Western Sydney that later benchmarked Australian students with counterparts elsewhere in Canada and Chile. Other groups have also expressed interest in the project. The project focused on challenges to Design and its Education in mainly four areas. Firstly, how to achieve intended learning outcomes confronted with issues of globalization. Second, the challenge to University as gatekeeper of professional standards. Then, issues about research on teaching and learning, new methodologies and process relating to design, manufacturing, implementation and delivery of products and services. Finally, the development of new distributed dynamics of work and production. Specifically, this paper narrates on the dilemma between traditional and new means for education and profession, collaboration towards new discourses and learning depending on understanding and use of technology either by students or teaching staff (i.e. Gen Y vs Baby Boomers; static vs ubiquitous lifestyle and learning, etc). Aware of society’s constant change, students were given an inclusive feel of professional life with access to industrial experts and political authorities on both continents, state of the art rapid prototyping and modeling facilities, videoconferencing, Skype, blogs, etc. The project pursued the creation of a ‘socio-technical collaboration’ brought about by concepts of ‘working together apart’, ‘role playing’, ‘authorship’, ‘ownership’ and ‘intellectual capital’ based on group and self evaluation and marking. Students’ work has been tailor made to fit each brief according to criterion-referenced approach with moderation, assessment and feedback by peer, blind, group and lecturers reviews. Ultimately, the goal pursued was total self-assessment and marking. Qualitative findings have been achieved through the application of action research methods. Changing the balance of traditional design education has opened the potential for a participatory culture and deeper democracy that will hopefully keep growing both new synaesthetic meaning-making and life long learning skills that fit with current society and industry requirements.