This research explored how educators with limited programming experiences learned to design mobile apps through peer support and instructor guidance. Educators were positive about the sense of community in this online course. They also considered App Inventor a great web-based visual programming tool for developing useful and fully functioning mobile apps. They had great sense of empowerment through developing unique apps by using App Inventor. They felt their own design work and creative problem solving were inspired by the customized mobile apps shared by peers. The learning activities, including sharing customized apps, providing peer feedback, composing design proposals, and keeping design journals (blogging), complemented each other to support a positive sense of community and form a strong virtual community of learning mobile app design. This study helped reveal the educational value of mobile app design activities and the web-based visual programming tool, and the possibility of teaching/learning mobile app design online. The findings can also encourage educators to explore and experiment on the potential of incorporating these design learning activities in their respective settings, and to develop mobile apps for their diverse needs in teaching and learning.

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Mobile App Design for Teaching and Learning: Educators’ Experiences in an Online Graduate Course

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed in this paper as “infrastructures of care,” have declined. Drawing on the findings of a transdisciplinary pilot study titled Cooling the Commons, this paper proposes that the production of the home as an enclosed and private space needs to be rethought as an infrastructure that potentially undermines more social, convivial, and environmentally sensitive responses to a warming world. The paper asks, what role might design now play in developing alternative infrastructures of care that start with the idea of “home” as a distributed proposition?

Infrastructures of Care: Opening up “Home” as Commons in a Hot City

With society increasingly valuing soft skills and competencies, reflective practices are more commonly adopted in higher education, particularly for experiential learning. As reflective writing is ...

An exploratory study on assessing reflective writing from teachers’ perspectives

The complexity of the current world is contributing to an increased dependency on innovative approaches and competences for solving open-ended problems and adjusting to multi-layered work environments. Creative ideation is valued not only in traditional creative fields such as design, craft and art, but also in all areas of work life. In design ideation the focus is on seeing beyond the obvious and developing personal constraints on the design task. Therefore, it can be seen as increasing the creativity in problem solving in general. Ideation is important as it is the basis for the rest of the design process. However, the research concerning design ideation is still sparse in Finland, as previous research has emphasised the entire design process. Accordingly there is lack of knowledge, concepts and definitions of ideation to support communication in designing and design education. The aim of this study was to understand design ideation and aspects that inspire and guide designers in the idea generation process. The study explored the conceptual and material premises for ideation, ways of creating novel standpoints towards ideation and the nature of the design context. The study used multiple qualitative methods; data were collected from a virtual e-learning database, by interviewing and using a mobile, context-sensitive data-collecting tool. The data-analyses applied qualitative content analysis. The study explored student teachers’ and professional designers’ design thinking in the ideation focusing on material resources and materially embodied practices for generating and transforming representations. The findings illustrated that interpreting sources of inspiration requires processes such as the use of analogical thinking and abstraction. In addition, creative ideation is a gradual development of ideas. The designer constrains the design situation through creation of visual-material ideas until a suitable idea(s) emerge. The findings encourage viewing design ideation as a multi-modal process in which representations are important triggers for ideation. The exploratory process of generating and transforming representations is a holistic making-related activity that is best supported by interaction with peers and different types of externalization methods. The study proposes two objectives that design tasks in education should address. Firstly, the ideation phase should include deliberate practices and a variety of techniques for manipulating representations to develop visual ideas. Secondly, the ideation process should embed meaning-making for personal engagement and exploration to pursue ideation towards wider contexts of learning.

/pdf/generating-and-transforming-representations-in-design-2kfndkiu66.pdf

Generating and transforming representations in design ideation

The promise of the short text: writing risk into visual arts practice In this study I aim to see if writing can enhance visual arts practice. Much UK Quality Assurance Agency and Higher Education visual arts documentation recommends risk, as do many practitioners. I hypothesise that very short, tightly-structured essays will foster risk by combining radical format, content demand and writing’s esteem. I experimented with essays by Foundation visual arts students at Coventry University in 2011. Half the group was assigned a short essay as above, the other half a 1,000-word, conventional essay. Both groups had the same essay topic choices; both were taught in the same way as far as possible; both assignments were individual. Practice-based presentations took place shortly after the essays, and students were advised of potential connections between the tasks. Quantitative data was taken from all essay and presentation grades; qualitative data from essay drafts, questionnaires and interviews with selected 128-word essay students. The grades show the 128-word essay students slightly outperforming the others. Four themes emerged from the qualitative data: provisional meaning, risk, practice parallels and project process. Drafts and questionnaires showed improvisation and keen engagement; interviews (loosely following Bryman’s ‘unstructured’ model) considered content, form, convention, risk and transferability of writing to practice. The main problems students faced when writing the short essays were how to say enough and how to mix tradition with innovation. There was evidence that some students connected the short essay with their practice – but to connect is not necessarily to enhance. The short essays were very diverse, some radically inventive, others less so – yet the study recommends caution when rethinking traditional writing assignments because some students respect traditional writing, and may find the extreme form of the very short essay patronising unless it can promise more. The study’s contribution to knowledge is to promise more by making writing a metaphor for practice and evaluated as such, taking writing beyond mimicking or analysing practice. The study also induced a supporting theory that absolutes and variables need careful balance, extending the bisociative notion of mixing tradition with innovation. The study showed that these short essays could enhance practice by fostering risk, but also that risk is very variable. This questions how such risks are evaluated, and even whether an enforced risk is a risk at all, and not just ingenuity. The thesis has six chapters: Introduction; Literature review; The short story in visual arts practice; The short essay in action; Student responses; Conclusion. Appendices contain three associated papers and all drafts with comments, questionnaires with responses, and full interview transcripts annotated to demonstrate emerging themes and connections to research questions. The study draws on reader-response as a theoretical framework, and is informed by the study of visual arts academic writing, risk-taking in visual arts practice, Koestler’s bisociative understanding of creativity, provisional meaning and the short story. The promise of the short text: writing risk into visual arts practice Simon Bell August 2013 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the University’s requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The promise of the short text : writing risk into visual arts practice

This article presents an approach for structured reflection by a designer through journal writing. The journal writing situates the agency of the designer, using a range of internal conversations as a way to expand horizons and perspectives. Through a structured approach using journal entries, experiences of the design process are introduced as reflective internal talkback. In the approach that is described, decision points and perspectives are negotiated and potentially contested through a series of voices of self as I, Me, You, and We. These voices are intertwined within the journal narrative and are proposed as a useful framework for negotiating and effectively engaging with design complexity. The article introduces the conceptual backgrounds with reference to conversation as a process of learning. The specific dynamics of the journal writing approach are explained and then illustrated in a case study. The case study describes how the approach is applied for a specific design project.

/pdf/the-conversational-self-structured-reflection-using-journal-3idst8wobf.pdf

The Conversational Self: Structured Reflection Using Journal Writings

Learning as experience: a model for teaching the reflective exegesis for communication design practice

Purpose – This paper aims to draw links between the circularity of second‐order cybernetics, and constructive, reflective conversations with oneself in design practice. The paper argues that a structured use of internal conversational dialogues with oneself can assist the design process, enhancing creativity and transformative approaches to design projects.Design/methodology/approach – Theories about the emergence of new knowledge, and the causal nature of internal conversations, are used to present a case for the value of a structured self‐reflective conversational process in designing. Emergent knowledge is described in terms of flows across domains of public and personal knowledge, through dynamic processes of semantic absorption, codification and diffusion. The structure and agency of the internal conversation are discussed as a practical way to interpret and locate the emergence of project directions, as a kind of meta‐language for design production. This is demonstrated through an action research ca...

Conversations with the self‐knowledge creation for designing

(2012). “Please Ask Us” Conversation Mapping as Design Research: Social Learning in a Verge Garden Site. Design Philosophy Papers: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 119-132.

“Please Ask Us” Conversation Mapping as Design Research: Social Learning in a Verge Garden Site

Digital technologies are increasingly providing a range of emerging possibilities for social enablement, and for engagement with local cultures and practices. The potential and actual functionality of Google Maps, Google Earth and other combinations of internet data immersion events, systems and projects (‘mashups’) raise questions around the quality and function of such emerging forms of embodied and virtual knowledge practices for urban cultural contexts. The strategic significance of how emergent mapping practices can engage with, and discover, new knowledge about urban configurations needs critical consideration. This article provides a critical overview of how some of these issues are explored at a trans-disciplinary workshop titled “Ecologies of Place”. This definition is given as a means through which to engage with both human and non-human forms of agency and materiality. Using a variety of mapping approaches across a range of disciplines, the intention was to challenge existing assumptions, engage with multiple discourses and open up new areas for potential research. This essay describes and critiques some of these emergent mapping approaches and describes in greater detail one mapping approach titled Future Research Scenario (FRS) through two case studies. This emergent mapping approach is located within the broader field of futurist practices around scenario thinking, and the defining of research questions. The FRS mapping approach involves participatory de-construction of planning proposals around what is termed the “Ecology of Place”. These representations are discussed as highly contextual, and driven by the involvement of the participants as relational problem explorations around defining questions for further research. Each case study leads to different outcomes highlighting strengths and difficulties that are contrasted as unique configurations of local mapping practices.

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Ecologies of place: emergent mapping practices, research perspectives and scenarios

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