This paper explores the educator experience and sense-making of design thinking pedagogy in the higher education context. Design thinking has become a pedagogical phenomenon in higher education due to its widespread relevance across many disciplines. Some studies discuss design thinking as a pedagogy in the educational context; however, there is a lack of empirical research to understand the educator perspective on design thinking pedagogy. Three design thinking educators who have had more than fifteen years of teaching experience were interviewed to explore their experiences. The data from these individual in-depth, semi-structured interviews were analysed employing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). One super-ordinate theme; capability building for everyone, and four subordinate themes; developing a participatory approach towards world issues; developing an open, explorative attitude; developing creative ability; and developing an ethical mindset were identified. From these findings, the paper argues that design thinking educators have the basis for a pedagogical rationale that transcends disciplinary boundaries and provides common ground for collaboration and on-going development of design thinking pedagogy as an emerging field in education.

This paper provides a critical examination of the taken for granted nature of the codes/guidelines used towards the creation of designed spaces, their social relations with designers, and their agency in designing for people with disabilities. We conducted case studies at three national museums in Canada where we began by questioning societal representations of disability within and through material culture through the potential of actor-network theory where non-human actors have considerable agency. Specifically, our exploration looks into how representations of disability for designing, are interpreted through mediums such as codes, standards and guidelines. We accomplish this through: deep analyses of the museums' built environments (outdoors and indoors); interviewed curators, architects and designers involved in the creation of the spaces/displays; completed dialoguing while in motion interviews with people who have disabilities within the spaces; and analyzed available documents relating to the creation of the museums. Through analyses of our rich data set involving the mapping of codes/guidelines in their "representation" of disability and their contributions in "fixing" disability, this paper takes an alternative approach to designing for/with disability by aiming to question societal representations of disability within and through material culture.

Since knowledge is the commodity museums produce, then understanding how this knowledge is produced, shaped, borrowed, and translated, and through what forces, is critical to creating inclusive museums. Through studies of three national Canadian museums, we came to an understanding of how the shaping of space, physical access, and access to knowledge is used and produced to create inclusive museums, not as a product but as an ongoing process. Doing dis/ordered mappings, as an alternate approach to understanding inclusion, allowed for an exploration of the material relations among people, spaces, and things, creating new trajectories and cartographic methods to explore inclusion within museums. This article introduces the benefits of the doing of mappings to explore differing embodiments of people, with and without disabilities, to create an alternative way to approach/encounter/create inclusion for all people and things in our public spaces.

There is growing recognition that methods that elicit the perspectives of vulnerable and marginalized people are essential in understanding the needs and aspirations of this group and therefore necessary when developing impactful policies, services, and environments that support them. Creative elicitation methods, which privilege participant voice, can be useful for conducting research with such populations. This chapter explores how research informed by care ethics, appreciative inquiry, and communicative methodology can support participant self-determination through the achievement of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. By advancing deliberate, iterative, and care-full research design that emphasizes belonging, dignity, and justice, cultural probes provide practical potential and ethical utility as a research method. The effectiveness of this care-full cultural probe approach is demonstrated and examined through a case study of a co-design research project concerned with designing for health and well-being at home with and for older adults.

Design Studies in Canada (and beyond) Volume 40, numéro 2, 2015 URI : id.erudit.org/iderudit/1035392ar