No abstract

Este artigo descreve o papel do estúdio de design como uma abordagem pedagógica e apresenta o desenvolvimento de um brief (nome utilizado para descrever o conteúdo programático de uma disciplina) realizado com alunos do terceiro ano de graduação em Design, em Aotearoa, Nova Zelândia. Uma estrutura mista de métodos quantitativos e qualitativos, foi empregada para o design da disciplina e seu conteúdo curricular. A literatura e as pesquisas com questionamentos centrados no ser humano informaram a construção do conteúdo e modos de interpretar os dados e situar os resultados. Usando Pesquisa baseada em design (Design-based research ou DBR (Collins, 1999; Brown, 1999) e uma metodologia utilizada por educadores para analisar o desenvolvimento do briefing, o artigo apresenta os resultados dos alunos e as atividades cronológicas desenvolvidas em sala de aula ao longo de um período de 12 semanas (correspondente a um semestre acadêmico). Experiências com clientes e usuários permitiram que os alunos compreendessem problemas complexos e interconectados dentro do tema de Design Social. O estudo teve como resultado um ambiente criativo e crítico, com o uso de atividades que promoveram a diversidade cultural e o uso da tecnologia com métodos colaborativos dentro das práticas do estúdio de design.

This study describes the framework of a brief developed for level 7 of a Bachelor of Graphic Design majoring in Communication Design and the design outcomes developed during an academic semester in Aotearoa. The brief employed the Design Studio approach to integrating social, technical and cognitive dimensions of knowledge construction. We explored the potential of Social Design to engage students in real-world problem and design outcomes to improve local and global contexts and facing problems that are complex and with long-term effects. The study seats in the post-positivist paradigm, and privileges the pluralism between quantitative data, and the qualitative perspectives of historical, comparative, philosophical, and phenomenological analysis. It contributes to discussions about the design studio approach in Design Education and methodologies for the development of tertiary-level curricula.

Learning and teaching in areas that require high levels of creativity, like Design and Art, can differ from other educational domains and methodologies. It may consider the complexity involving emergent properties activated from the interaction between many variables, including the researchers’ participation in what is researched. Design-based research methodology provides navigation for teaching experiences where learning outcomes are forged using briefs as design experiments or a way to carry out formative research to test and refine educational principles derived from previous knowledge. In this study, the brief operated as a pedagogical method to combine academic conventions of design research and practice. Using a learning and teaching experience with Communication Design students in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this study presents the methods applied in a paper brief that integrated social, technical, and cognitive dimensions of knowledge construction. The brief “Auckland Plan 2050: Promoting and researching a design plan for a growing city” was delivered to level seven students over twelve weeks period and employed several studio-driven activities. As a pedagogical approach, the design studio provided a space that privileged imagination, reflection-in-action over the empirical and the rational. The studio valued the learner’s worldview: their geographic localities, culture, their communities and the impact of the design to a broader context. Understanding the dynamics given by these spaces created opportunities to consider design teaching methods that were collaborative, informal, generative, and supportive. The studio-driven classroom brought research and practice together, and offered social media and emerging technologies as a tool for iteration and communication processes. The brief shed light on Social Design and started with a hypothetical research question: How do design outcomes increase awareness of a real-world problem? Using a Council’s long-term plan for Auckland city, students investigate specific issues, and challenges communities will face and design solutions that were industry, research-driven and culturally reflecting Kaupapa M?ori values. During sessions with M?ori scholars, entrepreneurs, and the design community, the brief provided a discursive platform that converged the design industry, stakeholders, and academia. The reflection about this complex social, cultural, and ecological network considered Auckland’s inhabitants’ needs and aspirations, enlightening a social perspective to design students. As a result, students developed award-winning cohesive design artefacts and extensive exegetical contextual analysis and documentation of the process. The outcomes branched from diverse media forms, including branding, graphic design, wayfinding, UX/UI, AR, and VR technologies. The moderation process between designers, academic staff, and stakeholders during a 3-year cycle demonstrated a successful model for integrating industry expertise and academic rigour, crafted through a paradigm oriented by practice. Surveys with students indicated a positive response associated with designing under real-world settings, which increased engagement and provided strategic platforms for iteration, dialogue, collaboration, and cultural diversity.

This artistic, practice-led PhD thesis is concerned with the potentials of polyvocality and interactive digital narrative. The practical project, Saints of Paradox, is constructed as a printed picture book that can be experienced through an Augmented Reality [AR] platform. The fictional story entails a woman who mourns the disappearance of her lover in the 1964 Brazilian coup d’état and lives for 40 years in a room of accumulated memories. IIn each illustration, the user can select three buttons on the tablet device that activates a different version of the story. Three narrators (saints) present interconnected but diverging interpretations of the events shaped by their distinct theological positions. The respective values of compassion, orthodoxy, and pragmatic realism distort details of imagery, sound, movement, and meaning. AR animated vignettes, each backed by a uniquely composed cinematic soundscape, allow characters to populate the luxuriously illustrated world. Candles flicker and burn, snakes curl through breathing flowerbeds, and rooms furnished with the contents of accumulated memories pulsate with mystery. The scanned image reviews an interactive parallax that produces a sense of three-dimensional space, functioning as a technical and conceptual component. Theoretically, the story navigates relationships between the real and the imagined and refers to magical real binary modes of textual representation (Flores, 1955, Champi, 1980; Slemon, 1988, 1995; Spindler, 1993; Zamora and Faris; 1995; Bowers, 2004). Here, meaning negotiates an unreliable, sometimes paradoxical pathway between rational and irrational accounting and polyvocal narration. The dynamics between the book and the AR environments produce a sense of mixed reality (actual and virtual). The narrative experience resides primarily in an unstable virtual world, and the printed book functions as an enigmatic unoccupied vessel. Because of this, we encounter a sense of ontological reversal where the ‘virtual’ answers the ambiguities presented by the ‘real’ (the book). In the work, religious syncretism operates as a reference to Brazilian culture and an artistic device used to communicate a negotiation of different voices and points of view. The strange and somehow congruous forms of European, African, and indigenous influences merge to form the photomontage world of the novel. Fragments of imagery may be considered semiotic markers of cultural and ideological miscegenation and assembled into an ambiguous ‘new real’ state of being that suggests syncretic completeness. Methodologically, the project emanates from a post-positivist, artistic research paradigm (Klein, 2010). It is supported by a heuristic approach (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985) to the discovery and refinement of ideas through indwelling and explicitness. Thus, the research draws upon tacit and explicit knowledge in developing a fictional narrative, structure, and stylistic treatments. A series of research methods were employed to assess the communicative potential of the work. Collaboration with other practitioners enabled high expertise levels and provided an informed platform of exchange and idea progression.