Writing in design education: The Magazine and the Studio as vehicles for writing development

Statement of link to the conference theme(s):
Design education currently faces increased demands for supporting academic writing due to the changing landscape of Higher Education. The discipline generally lacks a well-established discourse on academic writing development as well as shared practices. A new pedagogic approach using existing resources in design education programmes must therefore be developed. (W49)

Summary:
Drawing on two cases, we show how existing disciplinary-specific resources can be activated in order to support generic writing development in the field of design education. Using familiar formats and spaces in creative ways embeds the activity in the discipline and encourages students´ use of existing disciplinary skills and methods. (W49)

Abstract:
Design students should be uniquely prepared for research writing as design as a discipline requires the ability to approach the unknown in order to generate new knowledge, and as students are trained in process-oriented methods and to adapt their work continuously. But somehow, these skills do not seem to transfer in practice when it comes to academic writing. This might be due to a lack of familiarity with the academic genre as well as lack of knowledge of how to apply existing skills to the task of writing.
Academic writing development is not an established part of the design pedagogy discourse, and the connections between academic writing skills and core parts of the design curriculum such as critical thinking skills and digital literacy are often overlooked. This calls for developing a pedagogic approach that uses existing resources in design education.
We show that by drawing on disciplinary-specific resources already familiar to design students (in these cases “the magazine” and “the studio”), such resources can act as a bridge, allowing design students to engage with academic writing in ways that makes it possible for them to see how their disciplinary knowledge and methods can be applied in the context of academic writing.
This strategy offers a way of making generic writing support not only more accessible for design students, but accessible in ways that highlights the relevant disciplinary-specific skills design students already possess. Such strategies might also call for a general renegotiation of the relationship between disciplinary-specific and generic writing development.