Learning to Design Together: Introducing Conditional Design as a Method for Co-design Activities

In today’s world, designing include participation of users and stakeholders at different levels varying from minimum participation to co-creating with these actors. In such a context, it becomes crucial to include related educational modules to be able to prepare design students for their future professional practices. Based on this argument, this paper aims to propose conditional design as a method for co-design activities in design education by promoting the design process as a dynamic system which needs to be designed in itself. For
this purpose, two workshops were conducted in Istanbul as the empirical study of this paper. The participants of the workshops were students from Communication Design and Industrial Design undergraduate programs with different seniorities in the same faculty. In terms of its content and operative flow, all the workshops were organized in a way that would enable equal contribution from each student and an active learning space was provided to the students. Based on the feedbacks, it is possible to foresee that the workshops were positive experiences especially in terms of understanding the importance of collective creativity and beyond the educational purposes, the workshops seem to be useful to create an interstice in the disciplinary atmosphere of the classes.