Mapping Design Students' Aesthetic and Visual Preference

The overall purpose of our research is to investigate young designers design processes and methods on a global scale, by conducting a series of workshops at selected design universities in among others Taiwan, China, Brazil, South Africa, India and Russia. The focus of the research project is to compare and map cultural differences, similarities and preferences in young designers design approach in order to understand how globalization and localization influence design. It is also the purpose to investigate how different teaching methods influence the way the young designers understand the practice and conceptions of design. In March 2015 we conducted our first workshop at the Shih Chien University in Taipei, Taiwan (2015). The workshop focused on the “Wunderkammer” as a work method and as an analytical perspective. Museal as well as personal collections deal with objects as parts of wholes and of principles of collecting (Pomian 1990; Raahauge 1997 & 2001; Stjernfelt 1993), one of them being the Wunderkammer (Williams and Tsien 2013)), these perspectives have been at the core of our workshop, as a didactical method and as a way to combine diverse aesthetic, empirical and intuitive dimensions (Hansen 2014). The students were asked to create a “Wunderkammer” of personal collected images and things from their local cultural and physical environment. The focus of the workshops is collecting and organizing objects from the studens visual explorations within the following topics: body, home, urban space, identity, and cultural codes. The workshops are documented, analysed and compared in order to get a better understanding of how, and if, different universities’ learning methods and cultural backgrounds influence the students’ design approaches, practices and conceptions. In this way we hope to broaden the importance of design and to gain knowledge and understanding of how design is conceived, practiced and taught, furthermore we hope to pave the way for discussions and exchange on these topics and perspectives between design students and designers cross boundaries. The purpose of the mapping is to compile comparable data and propagate best practices from selected design universities in order to both maintain and strengthen local differences in design practices and perceptions but also to cross borders and find methods for collaborations within design praxis and research. In the paper we will unfold the project and discuss how it might be discussed in the framework of design education.