Help me teach design

Hey. And thanks!

And having lived on a few of these sorts of forums elsewhere, I realise I’m not really sticking to etiquette with this as a first post :wink:.

But I did look through that discussion, actually. Much of the advice in that thread is good stuff, but also mainly in the area of habits, skills, portfolio building and so on.

Points like this one:

Draw and sketch constantly. go to flea markets and buy old well-designed products and surround yourself with them. Take them apart and understand exactly how and why they were made

This is a great habit to develop, and super educational. But I find that I can only get students to invest in these sorts of things if they get why this is such a great habit (for which, in this case, I usually go over one or two pages of Bryan Lawson’s book ‘What Designers Know’ with them). But a lot of those theoretical reasons that seem to hit home are buried in a book somewhere that, taken as a whole, is far too much work to study, and probably not worth it for a first year’s student.

So that’s sort of the direction I want to look at. And maybe that should have been the question more: what ‘Eureka’ moments do people remember, what lightbulbs do you remember going off theoretically? (an additional goal would be to make my teaching a little more at home at a university, in addition to being a good preparation for professional life).

Another one:

You are there to learn how to give valuable, timely, incisive, inquisitive, critique.

I spend a lot of time in discussions with students about what, exactly constitutes that sort of critique, and why.

So again, what I’d like to try to add, and what I would be interested in talking about here is not so much what students should do (and asking them to trust me on that), but helping them understand why those things are important (so that I can appeal to reason, in stead of authority and experience).