The Schools of Design in Canada have formed an alliance to begin to evaluate the impact of technology on design education, particularly focused on issues of the translation of design pedagogies to electronic forums for delivery of design education and self directed learning.
The physical design disciplines (architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, etc.), have at their core the creation and representation of work in spatial forms. Other disciplines, and public participants not educated in this type of spatial literacy, find the approaches, methods and types of knowledge outside standard means of comprehension. This schism reinforces the dichotomy between the expert and the uninitiated, forcing design processes to be heavily dependent on prescriptive rather that performance based approaches. This dilemma is also apparent in design education, where the learning of fundamental concepts are vague or discussed in terms outside the initial learners personal experience, leading to design as being seen in an aura of mystique or as the result of idiosyncratic and highly personalized approaches. Representing spatial knowledge in understandable forms has traditionally been based on a "mentor-apprentice" model of education and learning, involving both institutional learning and private/public practice.
Representing design knowledge in ways that are more accessible and explicit by the public, participants and designers themselves offer the possibility of expanding the use and involvement of a wider range of participants in the design creation and decision making process. This will result in a wider range of inputs into what are seen as important but too complex problem solving situations affecting the public as users of design products. The process of developing spatial literacy and its languages is the basis for educating students and participants in the design process and the development of future design professionals. Research in this area is sorely lacking but is clearly an area of application for new techniques in the education and training of new designers. Little is known of the characteristics, methods and effectiveness of mentor-apprentice forms of learning or of the impacts of new media-communication technologies and their ability to support or develop more robust alternative models to learning and training. To bridge this gap techniques must be developed for conveying spatial knowledge in a form that can be shared, usable and useful to both teacher and student.
The Canadian Association of Computers in Design Education sees the proposed research Project 3 (e) of the EvNet Letter of Intent as a critical step to developing a rational evaluation strategy for comparing and testing the effectiveness of networking support tools as compared to traditional design education methods.
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