Hasta La Ideas

From L to R: Dr. Dori Tunstall, Dr. Deirdre Barron, Dr. Pi’Ikea Clark, Russell Kennedy, Vince Dziekan

Our awards announcements are underway at this point, but we always enjoy the opportunity to dig a little deeper and explore the process behind the results. Continuing our series of interviews with jury members—which started with a brief chat with Jens Martin Skibsted—Dr. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall shares her thoughts on captaining the Design Education jury.

CORE77 DESIGN AWARDS LIVE BROADCAST
July 12-22, 2011
10 Days. 15 Categories. Eight Countries. Live!!

Special thanks to the incredible jury team who worked on judging this year’s Design Education Initiative category.

Wednesday, July 13th
@6PM EST
DESIGN EDUCATION INITIATIVE
Judging location: MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Read on to learn more about Dr. Tunstall and her jury team after the jump!

Core77: Tell me a little bit about the actual process of putting together your jury team for the Design Awards.

Dr. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall: I think it was trying to put together a diverse set of educators, not just design educators. So, when I think about the group, there is an amazing design educator, Russell [Kennedy], coming from communication design but also having a really global perspective as President of the ICOGRADA…he’s traveled all around the world and is able to see what some of the global trends are in terms of design education. It was really important to have someone who had that global perspective.

Deirdre [Barron], my colleague at Swinburne, she has a background in education, so that’s what her Ph.D. [is] in. And so she probably, more than anyone else, knows a lot about pedagogy and how important it is to have a clear notion of what it is.

Pi’ikea [Clark] is really important. Right now at Swinburne we’re putting a strong emphasis on what we call respectful design, and part of that is actually understanding different ways of knowing. Pi’ikea represents a combination of indigenous knowledge as a way of knowing, but also he’s in the process of figuring out how to build design curriculum that respects indigenous knowledge.

So the intention was to have a really diverse set of people who knew a lot about education, knew a lot about design but also had a glimpse into the future in terms of what design needs to become in order to be a sort of global force for building a better world. That’s one of the things I [had] in mind when I brought everyone together.

You speak about “Design for a better world” and there’s no higher calling for designers. The lens you’re looking through is very interesting, as far as evaluating a.) thinking about design, and b.) the projects themselves.

I’ll talk about the criteria for evaluation first because I created a sort of judging worksheet for everyone, where we looked at three aspects: first, overall clarity of the design education framework. So whether or not it actually had an expressed pedagogical or andragogical instructional approach, so behaviorism or cognitivism or constructivism. But we were looking to make sure that each winner had actually expressed what it was they were trying to do from an educational perspective.

The second thing we were looking at, from a framework perspective, is whether they actually had a key design philosophy around who drives the design brief, whether it’s self-defined or client-defined, the tools that are being used, high-tech or working on hand skills, and then whether the outcomes that they’re looking for are either process outcomes or what we call ‘really cool artifact’ outcomes. But that was the other thing that we were looking [for] from design education perspective: whether or not they had clearly expressed a philosophy around design, but also a philosophy around education itself.

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