How can we get design educators and students to think beyond themselves? Considering other body shapes, sizes, ages and interests is essential for inclusive designs. But designing with users, or co-design, is another skill set. Fake personas, building codes and anthropometric data are a good start, but they lack the evidence of lived experience. Without inclusive designs, we cannot meet our commitment for the Sustainable Development Goals.
The issue of teaching educators to look beyond the tried and true design methods is being tackled by a team from Queensland University of Technology. In their article, they take a critical look at current approaches to design education in architecture and interior design studios. They propose an “authentic learning approach” which includes engagement with real users.
The title of the article is, Breaking Barriers: Educating Design Students about Inclusive Design through an Authentic Learning Framework. You will need institutional access for a free read. Or you can contact Janice Rieger and ask for a copy.
Abstract
Current studies in design education suggest that students and educators base their designs on what they already know about themselves and their peers, or on stereotypical notions of others. This article presents a critical examination of a pedagogical approach employed in several architecture and interior design studios to determine how best to develop student understanding of how to design for real users and users with abilities different from themselves. This authentic learning approach with spatial design students and teachers from the School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Australia and with people with differing abilities, used qualitative and quantitative questionnaires, student journals and design studio projects to create a multimodal data set. While there are no simple conclusions, or easy answers to unravel the complexity in creating inclusive designs, our findings point towards enabling new engagements and knowledge processes and scaffolding these activities around authentic learning, so that design students and educators can begin to understand the differing ways of designing for/with people with disabilities. The significance of this research is that it opens up new approaches for teaching design students about inclusive design beyond fake personas, building codes and anthropometric data, and provides evidence of the need for a more holistic, authentic and scaffolded approach.