In the past three decades, designers have adopted an innovative position as practitioner- researchers in universities by conducting academic research through their creative practice. Many scholars have acknowledged and discussed the will to communicate through creative means. Such endeavours have always been part of the learning and teaching in Graphic Design but how practice-led research sits within university institutions at the undergraduate level requires further investigation. This article offers insights into five design practitioners developing research projects led by the practice, of academics at Auckland University of Technology, in Auckland, New Zealand. These undergraduate candidates are undertaking research by creative practice in the broad field of Visual Communication Design. These new practitioners/researchers to the academic space feel profound and unsettled tensions, for whom traditional research approaches seem too ordered to capture the dynamism of the inquiry process, which lies at the heart of their creative practice. They seek an approach that can offer high levels of interdisciplinarity and focus on skill and competence to produce insights into a socio-material iterative design process. The article presents, with a commentary on practice, five projects operating in the context of complex problems young designers face and their understanding of the design work as it relates to practice and research. The article contributes to advancing a shift in higher design education towards creative practice as an approach to research, promoting the social and the cultural rather than design that is industrially driven. While working within this scope, it is envisaged that some arguments and inferences will have applicability beyond the Aotearoa and for other creative practices, practitioners and researchers.
There is increased interest in recent literature on the disfluency effect in an effort to contextualize the outcomes for typography research that is grounded in functional readability. Recently, a small group of typographic and legibility researchers have begun to call for more collaboration to generate knowledge that is useful and practical ( Thiessen, Beier & Keage, 2020). This article presents a practice-led design research project that utilises iterative drawing and typographic arrangements through an autoethnographic approach, to convey personal experience with dyslexia. The project reflects on the question: How can iterative drawing and typographic composition be used to graphically express one’s subjective dyslexic learning experience? As a secondary question that is particularly focused on practice, is how the project can contribute to provide insights to a non-dyslexic audience of the word comprehension and typographic disfluency facing people with dyslexic conditions. The research is informed by a range of contextual practice, practitioners, and literature, into the states and conditions of the dyslexic experience, the use of typographic adaption and Risograph printing. The project is grounded as a practice-led approach, where creative practice and research are complementary but distinctive. The research is based within the world of concern defined by practice while the practitioner researcher is at the centre of the research (Vear, 2022). To elicit a dyslexic perspective, the project employs autoethnography as a strategy for gathering and evidence interpretation through a critical illustration and typographic design process. The research contributes to current discourses to areas such as those related to the typographic principles of visual cuing and emphasis as well as other broader areas such as how we may be able to determine threshold for disfluency, and what impact graphical distractions have on the disfluency effect.
This article presents the impact COVID–19 had on a first-year communication design curricula revitalisation to progress students from a secondary level standards-based criterion to a tertiary culture predicated on active and experiential practice-led studio inquiry. Methodologically, it describes a design-based research intervention that asks what occurred in the translation of a brief written as an in-person, studio-based model into a purely online undertaking, learning from anywhere, teaching in a constant state of flux? Through a commentary on practice, the revitalisation of a design programme, and the pedagogical shift from within the traditional studio paradigm–a dynamic on-campus, in-person model into an abrupt and atypical online undertaking due to the global pandemic, this paper contributes to a discourse on a design studio approach and presents the transference of the Learning Management System that supports distance learning.
Design-based research or DBR is a methodology developed by and for educators that aims to improve the impact, transference, and translation of education research to benefit practice. In DBR, the educator is simultaneously the teacher and the researcher (Kuhn & Quigley, 1997). It is a flexible approach that facilitates iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings (Wang & Hannafin, 2005). The collaboration in this design-based study acknowledges that researchers also function as educators to create and measure the impact of design interventions (Collins, 1992). In this instance, the interventions were the strategies required to translate communication designcurricula from an on-campus face-to-face teaching and learning studio model to a distance learning paradigm due to COVID-19. This abstract presents the impact COVID-19 had on a first-year curricula revitalization aimed to progress students from a standards-based criterion (often accused of shallow learning) to a tertiary culture predicated on active and experiential inquiry. Two main points will be discussed: firstly, the pedagogical components of design studio practice, its cognizance of materiality and craft and objectives to foster students learning and engagement, appreciative of diverse worldviews and epistemologies. Secondly, it will present the disruption and experience of the academic team having to recalibrate,develop and prototype online content to accommodate the technological parameters and functionality of an obsolescent learning management system. A review of the syllabus commenced in 2019 to reenergise an outdated studio course for incoming first-year students, with a new brief, intending to function as a scaffold from the passive behaviour, associated with the secondary sectors NCEA1 model, towards an engaged and autonomous learner that is required at tertiary level. Accordingly, identity and belonging were selected as key themes, aiming to advance aspirations for a reciprocal learning culture, encouraged by the need to establish connections and community; the knowledge of identity and agency for self-actualization (Maslow, 1962), alongside understanding relevant media and communication design conventions. Dewey (1937) argued that learning is based on social and interactive processes, and the notion that students accumulatively learn more from their peers alsoacknowledges the requirements of specific interventions to construct the conditions for peer-to-peer learning experiences and relationships. March 2020 would, however, present another variable that would alter the trajectory of our two semesters substantially: the advent of a global pandemic and the challenges it imposed, requiring unprecedented recalibration as students and lecturers conjointly faced the sudden onset and pivot to adopt the virtual remote classroom. This paper will examine the data and findings collated from this period and reflect on the adaptation of a studio paradigm designed for on-campus in-person delivery into an online undertaking, teaching in a state of flux and uncertainty. 1 National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA) are national qualifications for senior secondary school students in New Zealand.
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