Becoming a designer: Some contributions of design reviews

The chapter presents a study of 1:1 desk crits between an instructor and five students in the early stages of a design project that forms part of their formal education in Industrial Design. The study is based on inspection of video-recordings and transcripts of what the participants say during their meetings. The study is motivated by interests in how design expertise is acquired through experiences of designing and in how novice designers are assisted to develop their own positions as designers. The discourse is characterized through organizing its description according to a range of roles the instructor adopts. The study draws attention to how the instructor directs, guides and encourages the students in ways which both serve the immediate design task they face and presents students with opportunities to develop their own design values and preferences and to become more aware of their own design sensibilities. The work proposes that developing an appreciation of how design proposals, viewed as rhetorical instruments, can serve to scaffold the novice designer’s own thinking and support the presentation of preferred designs to others is a significant facet of designer competence which supports professional design practice. The chapter uses material from the project studied to draw to notice the particular practice of developing designs whose raison d’être is to serve these rhetorical purposes.