The continued viability of art and design programmes depends on our ability to produce graduates able to contribute successfully and confidently to the future of the creative industries. This in turn depends on our ability to lead students to develop both the ability and the motivation to learn. A significant proportion of our students however,…

Compared to other professions in recent years, architecture has lagged woefully behind in attracting and retaining a diverse population, as defined by class, race and gender. This research investigates the extent to which architecture culturally reproduces itself, specifically examining the socialisation process of students into the subculture of…

A design studio is a critical venue for design students, as they are educated to develop design thinking and other skills through studio courses. This article introduces a design studio project in which Korean and Malaysian students worked jointly for one semester to design affordable urban housing. The Korean students were interior design majors…

This article explores how Johanson's ecological public art and landscape design addresses current social issues and community necessities. It also examines how her designs may serve as a communication tool for the surrounding society, and how her public art may provide new perspectives for community members, scientists, artists, engineers,…

In the wake of the recent demolition of the 1965 Chelsea School of Art building on Manresa Road in London, this article seeks to explore the relationship between art school architecture and art school pedagogy. Research on art school buildings, both national and international, and British art school education of the 1960s, is brought to bear, on…

Design is a transformative, socially engaged practice and design education must provide a platform from which that practice can grow. Education plays a vital role in preparing design students to move beyond a purely reactive state to one in which they are actively engaged in shaping the world around them. Such a shift is built upon the provision…

Today the changing nature of design practice and the role of design within a widening domain indicate that the survival of design as a profession may depend less on traditional design education and more on responding strategically to contemporary changes, influenced by ethical and environmental issues as well as technological advancements. As a…

As today's digital applications hold our gaze and become increasingly ubiquitous, it is easy to dismiss the previous technologies and processes that provided yesterday's creative opportunities. Photography has been revolutionised by digital capture and transmission in the past decade. It could be argued that there is a digital orthodoxy in…

Education reforms from teacher-centred to student-centred courses usually come with the adoption of new teaching strategies. However, following the growing design and development of student-centred teaching and learning innovations in many fields of study, not many efforts have been found in the field of software application teaching. Therefore,…

It is generally accepted that art and design related disciplines attract a higher proportion of students with dyslexia than traditional academic counterparts. Combined with this is a prevalent perception that dyslexia predominantly affects students' writing and linguistic ability and it is this, as well as an increased visual-spatial sensibility,…

Curiosity is often considered the foundation of learning. There is, however, little understanding of how (or if) pedagogy in higher education affects student curiosity, especially in the studio setting of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture. This article provides a brief cultural history of curiosity and its role in the design…

Design thinking can be a powerful way to engage the world, allowing interactive understandings that are both analytic and experiential. When fully functioning, design thinking necessarily calls upon faculties often considered a-rational, a-causal and a-logical. Unfortunately, such faculties often give rise to academic suspicion. That is to say,…

This article discusses the process of a study designed to develop university students' sketching skills in schools of architecture. Acknowledging the relationship between cognition and writing, it aims to investigate the role of writing in learning sketching among architecture students and to examine how students regulate their thoughts by writing…

This article describes a design/build exercise conducted in an Architectural Materials and Methods class to achieve three interrelated objectives: (1) to apply physically the semester's theoretical focus on the constituent process and languages of architecture investigations, (2) to capitalise on the physical and aesthetic properties of concrete…

This article describes an ongoing research project at the University of the Arts, London, which investigates the learning and creativity of a group of students with mental health difficulties. It discusses emerging findings on one theme, that of motivation. Employing a longitudinal biographic narrative methodology, this research, now entering its…