By means of the bachelor proof, students of interior architecture of the University of Antwerp (Faculty of Design Sciences) are stimulated to design interiors for real-life public libraries in view of particular societal challenges. During three subsequent years the teaching staff elaborated a set of learning objectives and activities that jointly form a competence-based learning process focussed on the development of the societal awareness of design students. In this paper we report on the intermediate experiences of the teachning staff and the students as indicated by a set op mainly qualitative data. In short it concerns four lessons learned relating to the over-and underestimation of (i) disciplinary filters, (ii) comfort-zones, (iii) motivating complexities and (iv) copy-cat behavior.
Developing societal context awareness in interior architecture students is one of the main objectives of the bachelor thesis at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). By means of a 2-year project on public libraries (2014)(2015)(2016), the coaches of the design studio initiated research into the changing role of public libraries and the societal embedding of interior architecture, as well as the empathic role of the designer. The article is based on data acquired by the use of various qualitative research techniques, such as focus group debates with the studio coaches, analysis of the coaching sessions with the students, and analysis of the comments of the expert jury in the first research year, supported by half-structured individual interviews with students in the second research year. Based on an initial explorative evaluation of this research project it is clear that the development of societal context awareness in students is hindered by three phenomena: an activated selective perception, a dominant comfort-zone reflex, and copy-cat behavior. The article subsequently reports on (a) the subject of the bachelor thesis (i.e. Flemish public libraries and their societal challenges), (b) the pedagogical design of the renewed bachelor thesis, (c) the ex-ante and ex-post perceived societal awareness of the students, and (d) an initial set of identified enablers and disablers of the learning process. The article concludes that interior educators should continue to invest in triggering and developing societal awareness in their students if the interior discipline aspires to "the social compact to do good."Our focus on societal context awareness is not only related to the internal debate within the interior discipline but also to important changes within the discipline of public management. Given the subsequent trends of new public management (NPM) and public governance (PG),
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