Making as a Way to Construct Design Thinking

In The Craftsman, Sennett argued that engagement with things, tools, and procedures could facilitate leaps of imagination.1 These engagements are a way to improve qualities of experiences, or the craft of experience, by understanding their forms and procedure, or techniques of experiences. In pedagogy, it is a form of learning-by-doing. Our awareness of the properties of materials, the ways tools perform, and the techniques we work with can help us explore possibilities in transforming a thing into another. In this vein, we are interested in developing a design pedagogy that starts from engagement with things, tools, and techniques. We set design problems that problematized observations, procedures in drawing and modeling, properties of materials, and artifacts. We applied this problem in studios in different years with increasing complexities. Findings from these problems serve as a starting point for designs of habitable spaces. Of interest here is the way students transpose engagements to an artifact, a type of material, or a production technique to generate a design process. What would be teaching methodology to facilitate the growth design thinking in this context? How did students go about finding solutions?

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.88

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ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5