In general, designing is conceived as a complex, personal, creative and open-ended skill. Performing a well-developed skill is mainly an implicit activity. In teaching, however, it is essential to make explicit. Learning a complex skill like designing is a matter of doing and becoming aware how to do it. For teachers and students therefore, it will be helpful to make the design process explicit. In this paper, a conceptual framework is developed to be more explicit about the design process. Based on research of the design process, on differences between novices and expert designers, and on personal experience in design education practice, five generic elements in the design process are distinguished: (1) experimenting or exploring and deciding, (2) guiding theme or qualities, (3) domains, (4) frame of reference or library, (5) laboratory or (visual) language. These elements are generic in the sense that they are main aspects and always present in the complex, personal, creative and open-ended design process.Shareable link: http://rdcu.be/FxxY

In this article we evaluate the manner in which we at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology encourage the development of the capacity of reflection among our undergraduate students. First we explore the concept of reflection in relation to respectively experiential/reflective learning, reflection in/on action, reflection in higher education and reflection in design education. Next we describe our research object, our Bachelor course in Academic Design Reflection. Two research questions are at hand: (1) does the level of reflection increase during our course and (2) Can the operationalisation in our questionnaire of the definitions of reflection derived from theory statistically be confirmed? We measured and processed statistically the level of reflection of 100 students in 3 of their papers on their design. Results show there is a significant slight increase of this level among the three papers. Results also show that our model of classification is not statistically confirmed in the data. We conclude with a discussion on the implications for further research and for design education.

Historical investigation anchors architectural and urban practice. Analyzing two sets of questionnaires distributed in different class settings, this paper explores two questions: how do design students currently learn about architectural history, and how do they translate this knowledge into their design practice? First, tentative conclusions are that (1) physical engagement with buildings outside the classroom is an important inspiration for the students, (2) (assigned) books definitely influence their (design) thinking, (3) different types of pedagogy-lecture, seminar, thesis, studio-affect student learning in different and complementary ways, and (4) students overwhelmingly see history as a relevant preparation and foundation for design, but this understanding is implicit and often unspecific. Keywords Architectural education • Pedagogies of design • History of architecture • History of urban form • Design education

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