Learner Centered Design Education

This is a short (18 minute) podcast about making a list of or a glossary of actors. I use gym work and muscle cars to illuminate, to throw light on the existence of a specific language. Of specific terms, which can be drafted to serve in an orchestra of actors.

Transcription link coming soon.

This was a walk. A long one. And I reflect upon three aspects of pedagogy - the PhD supervisions, the Capstone Project Supervision and the first year as a liminal space.

This is an episode about Placements and about my current project - "I am the Project" in Capstone Work. It is a pedagogy account. Or a musing about what I do in this space.

Soumitri Varadarajan discusses the decline in campus placements in India, noting a lack of industry interest this year. He reflects on his experience coordinating placements at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the cultural significance of campus recruitment. Varadarajan connects this trend to global layoffs and the impact of AI on job markets, particularly in the tech sector. He also explores the evolution of industrial design education and the shift of graduates into tech jobs. Varadarajan emphasizes the importance of self-initiative and global mobility for students, suggesting a need to reevaluate university curricula and the role of higher education in preparing students for diverse career paths.

This is an episode that relates to a studio within the territory of The Social Object. The Social Object is a book I have written.

Why have I been offering prompts within a design studio setting?

The Social Object LINK

The aim of the author has been to silence the voice of the designer to allow the accounts of objects to emerge as periodic irruptions that reveal a hidden maelstrom of passion, ideas and ailed projects. The book opens with the biography of a project dealing with waste, leading the reader to a very particular kind of object, the bads. This object is illicit, handled by criminals and in the writing by the author serves to invert the dominant discourse of objects as commodities. This book makes the case that the program of design is better seen as a democratic community, where the householders, the zietgiest, technology and all manner of hidden agents collide to allow unforseen periodic objects to emerge.

The Social Life of Things LINK

The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after.

This is a 17 minute session. It is me musing about what Independent Study could be when located within a design context.

This is the third episode in a a mini series on - 2 kinds of innovation and the designer maker. As the definitive definition of Industrial Design? What is design when the post code is de-industrialised? Is it still okay to use this phrase?

This is the second episode in a three part series on Innovation - specifically as it pertains to Industrial Designers.

This year I have reframed Industrial Design as being in 3 parts. Social Innovation + Technical Innovation + Designer Maker. That is it.

In this way we lay to rest the practice of referring to Industrial Design bits with Product Names. Or category Names. Or transient names aka fashionable names.