Our purpose as educators is not to teach individual mastery of tasks, but promote learning that can be transferred to higher level and more challenging design problems. This creates future designers with the skills to tackle all of the changes and challenges that are ahead of them in their professional careers. In order to increase the transfer of knowledge, Ellmers, Brown and Bennett explore the value of changing our focus from the final artifact as the primary measure of learning to the process of how students arrive at the final artifact as a solution.

 

Looking at the two ways of knowledge transfer studied by educational psychologists Perkins & Saloman (1989). ‘Low-road’ is transferring knowledge from one context to another that is related or similar to another. ‘High-road’ is tranferring knowledge from one to a unrelated or new context.

 

When you think about graphic design, new problems tend to be different from previous ones because each design problem is unique and variable in a lot of ways. This means that graphic designers tend to use a lot more ‘high-road’ transfer of knowledge in practice.

 

Too increase the ability of our students to practice knowledge transfer, we need to reflect on the process that occurred while developing a solution for the problem presented. If you think about how we teach our students in traditional studio structure, the doing, or learning through experience creates a constant evolution of a problem until the solution is reached. Students are immersed in the process of creating, but are rarely reflecting upon the thoughts, decision-making and “a-ha” moments that can come along the way. Once the final artifact is reached, a lot of that learning is forgotten.

 

To encourage reflection during the process there is a cyclical pattern that moves the student in and out of reflection. It starts with a design brief that outlines or names the problem. The the problem is put into its context or framework. Once the problem and context are established the design activity starts. Using critiques and guided feedback, students should reflect on the process while they are experiencing it. How does their discovery effect or change the context? Does it change or add to the original problem?

 

Using cues and questions to help students reflect on these changes and decision-making process will help engage them further in their own process, making connections though knowledge transfer. This can happen through discussion or journaling. The biggest key to building understanding is to have students reflect on the project once the final outcome is complete. Again using guided questions, students can begin to reflect on now that they are separated from it. Ask them about “critical” moments in the design process and how they might change the outcome or artifact. How might they approach a similar problem in the future?

 

When building reflection into our process, we will need to adjust for additional time during our usual project timeline. This could mean less projects or activities over a semester to allow for this recognition, but the learning itself will increase and build more than just individual task-based thinking.