Selling Your Design: Oral Communication Pedagogy in Design Education

Abstract

Good design skills are the main focus of assessment practices in design education and are evaluated primarily by drawings and models. In some settings, design studio pedagogy tends to reflect only these content-oriented assessment priorities, with minimal attention paid to the development of oral communication skills. Yet, in many professional contexts, architects need both sets of skills: design competence and the ability to articulate designs for an audience. This paper explores two approaches to oral communication pedagogy in design education-a public speaking approach and a genre-based linguistic approachand then applies one particular linguistic approach to novice design studio presentations. Based on the findings of this study, we argue that the linguistic, genre-based approach can best offer language-based, discipline-specific description of performance strategies, rhetorical structures, and the linguistic realizations of such structures. Such information can contribute to improved pedagogical practice in the design studio.

Communication Across the Curriculum and in the Disciplines: A Call for Scholarly Cross-curricular Advocacy

“…To be successful, students needed to be able to comprehensively explain visuals, demonstrate the design evolution in a systematic manner, advocate transparently for their design intent, credibly stage their presentation, and manage interactions (Dannels, 2005b;Dannels, Housley Gaffney, & Norris Martin, 2008). In addition, competent critique presenters needed to use rhetorical strategies to convey a narrative style and use linguistic and kinesthetic strategies to convey an intimate relationship between both themselves and the design process and themselves and the images of the design (Morton, 2006;Morton & O'Brien, 2005). Given the prominence of feedback as its own communicative genre in the critique, research in this era also described a typology of nine types of feedback and argued that feedback types varied across novice and expert design studios .…”

Students' Talk about the Climate of Feedback Interventions in the Critique

“…Specifically, studies suggest that successful critique performances include a comprehensive explanation of visuals, a demonstration of the design evolution in a systematic manner, a transparent illustration of design intent, a credible staging of the presentation, a careful management of critique interactions, and narrative linguistic and kinesthetic communication strategies Morton, 2006;Morton & O'Brien). One feature of critiques that makes them distinct from many other oral genres is the centrality of feedback.…”

“…scholars working in design settings have examined this culture, specifically by exploring critique structures and formats, as well as the necessary communication competencies students need to embody to be successful in the critique (Dannels, 2005;Dannels, Housley Gaffney, & Martin 2008;Morton & O'Brien, 2005). Specifically, studies suggest that successful critique performances include a comprehensive explanation of visuals, a demonstration of the design evolution in a systematic manner, a transparent illustration of design intent, a credible staging of the presentation, a careful management of critique interactions, and narrative linguistic and kinesthetic communication strategies Morton, 2006;Morton & O'Brien).…”

Informal peer critique and the negotiation of habitus in a design studio

“…The role of developing appropriate patterns of communication about design has been a minor focus in the research literature, including the development of practice-oriented discourse (Logan 2008;Morton and O'Brien 2006) and a discourse directly surrounding the critique and feedback process (Dannels et al 2008), but the amount of work in this area is limited. Some comparisons may be drawn between critique and assessment, particularly in more formal implementations of critique (e.g., pin-ups or design juries), but informal critique appears to be more emergent, mirroring the professional obligations to communicate and externally reflect with peers (Hokanson 2012), rather than as formative or summative assessment.…”