A Learning and Teaching Intervention to Shape Responsible Design Practices

Our paper considers a teaching intervention as a means to instigate learning around responsibility, via an understanding of impact within design practice, where the underpinning action research approach affords continuous analysis and reflection across teaching implementation. Our research focuses on a six-stage workshop undertaken by 80 students, from a range of design disciplines and levels. The four-hour workshop utilises interrogatory, disruptive and prioritising activities to interrupt and explore an existing design project. Students independently and collaboratively analyse their projects across three defined areas (overview / approach / stakeholders), by mapping, connecting and challenging the systems associated with their projects. Our analysis of collected observations and participant feedback suggest that the workshop learning environment enables students to challenge their thinking and to navigate areas of complexity, decision-making and discovery, where the findings illuminate how this prompts students to distil their objectives, define their choices and become more conceptually elastic. Significantly, our data suggests that the experience enables students to identify what matters to them versus others and to develop a clearer connection with their values, judgements and responsibilities. Whilst the workshop tasks were not affected by discipline type, we assert that the timing of the intervention within a course project does affect engagement with some workshop aspects. We have also identified that for the intervention to have a lasting impact, our further research needs to explore follow-up methods and facilitated scaffolding. We have set out to test curriculum design that supports students to consider the consequences and complexities of their design choices and the interconnectedness of the ecological and social systems their designs inhabit. We argue that this facilitated learning experience prompts a greater self-awareness, pointing to responsible design practices and the nurturing of future citizen designers.