{"title":"The dramatization of practice in design education: (Un)learning by doing through participant observation","authors":"Andrea Gaspar","doi":"10.1386/adch_00051_1","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Although ‘learning by doing’ is nowadays a standard practice in design education, there is not much reflexivity about what designers actually do with a ‘learning by doing’ approach. Based on my ethnographic research in a design school in Milan, I examine designers’\n performance of practical learning by looking at their use of participant observation, a method borrowed from social sciences and applied to an early stage of the students’ design research projects. I detail how, in the exercises with participant observation, ‘practice’ emerges\n as an aesthetic effect that is performed to simulate the openness of the research, a process I refer to as a ‘dramatization of practice’.","PeriodicalId":42996,"journal":{"name":"Art Design & Communication in Higher Education","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Art Design & Communication in Higher Education","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00051_1","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Although ‘learning by doing’ is nowadays a standard practice in design education, there is not much reflexivity about what designers actually do with a ‘learning by doing’ approach. Based on my ethnographic research in a design school in Milan, I examine designers’
performance of practical learning by looking at their use of participant observation, a method borrowed from social sciences and applied to an early stage of the students’ design research projects. I detail how, in the exercises with participant observation, ‘practice’ emerges
as an aesthetic effect that is performed to simulate the openness of the research, a process I refer to as a ‘dramatization of practice’.