This project required me to play a number of roles consecutively. I began connecting the coursework requirements to the broader state of the strategic design industry and connecting these together through meaningful and tangible briefs. I then went about putting together the courseware using clear and compelling artefacts across presentations, workshop boards and LMS inputs.
From there, my role moved between facilitator of student learning throughout the lectures, and practice coach as I supported them through their projects in tutorials, and then again when I reviewed and assessed their eventual submissions.
My role was crucial in formulating project briefs and educational content that pushed students to explore and address societal issues creatively and critically. Through lectures and hands-on tutorials, I guided students to deliver thoughtful design solutions, significantly enhancing their understanding and skills in applying design thinking to real-world problems.
“Adam articulates and explains each of the topics with good emphasis and examples. I like that Adam puts extra effort into the slides and also shares his personal experiences. It’s an eye opener for me seeing Adam present and showcase his ideas the way he does”
– Feedback from a student.
This teaching experience enriched my perspective on the educational needs of design students in a global context. It reaffirmed the importance of problem space exploration in design education and underscored the necessity of integrating local cultural insights into the curriculum to ensure relevance and impact. The positive outcomes from the students' projects and their high engagement levels reinforced my belief in the power of design education as a catalyst for social change.
An example of one of the three Miro boards used to provide useful reference points and resources for students as they addressed the briefs.
During 2021, in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, I was approached by RMIT to construct and deliver a one week intensive on strategic design for their Singapore Institute of Management communication design students, all based in Singapore. This work involved the formulation of three project briefs, two lectures and a week of tutorial activities, with the students eventually delivering a holistic body of design deliverables exploring and addressing a selected social issue in Singapore.
In the initial planning of this course, I worked with the course coordinators and lecturers to understand and set a vision for what the students would learn from my facilitation and guidance. This led to an initial vision for the topic I would instruct the students in:
Design and strategic thinking in the context of social awareness and change.
As the students were familiar with a typical communication design process (in which the focus is primarily the solution space), we agreed that an additional focus would be to help the students become comfortable with the problem space and ambiguity.
To explore the possible content and topic directions, I set about having more in-depth conversations with my two colleagues from RMIT and SIM to understand more about the students, their context, and the social situation in Singapore. I was cautious that I was a Melbourne-based lecturer asking the students to explore social change and social awareness, and so I ensured that I was led by Singaporean perspectives throughout the initial exploration.
In addition, I gathered a number of universal perspectives of design and strategic thinking in the context of social awareness and change to bring together to form as the basis for the course topics.
The principal reference point became Singapore’s Design 2025 Masterplan, containing visions for the role of design in Singapore and the strategic directions to take it there.
The next stage required the formulation of the central briefs around which the course content would revolve. This required the mapping out of separate, interrelated design activities for the students which were each visualised across a representation of the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond.
The activities required to address each brief, laid out across the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond framework.