From Making Things to Making Meaning: The Imperative of Design Literacy in Higher Education

Introduction

Design is the quality of the material world. It is used as a noun and a verb to refer to the making of objects and experiences and the set of processes that creates them (Balsamo, 2009; Jones, 2014). On the other hand, design in the digital world assumes a nuanced meaning and function; it becomes a meaning-making process. In digitally mediated communication, integration of digital images, sounds or videos, allow for multimodal forms of meaning-making (Apperley & Beavis, 2013; Cazden et al., 1996). Meaning making is the essence of communication and the foundation of the concept of literacy.

The term literacy is commonly associated with the ability to read and write using printed words or texts. In the digital environment, text transforms into hypertext. Texts become richer, multimodal, complex, and necessitate new sets of skills for learning beyond the traditional literacies of reading and writing. Multimodal texts are non-linear information generated from images, coding diagrams, videos or interactives that require a deeper sense of learning to help students make sense of different types of information in the digital environment (Victoria-State-Government, 2022). Design offers a rich platform to build this type of literacy in the digital environment by helping students learn how multimodal texts works to create meaning and build knowledge. The digital era is characterized by a networked and knowledge-based economy. Knowledge in the digital era is abundant but also dynamic and changing at unprecedented rate. While explicit knowledge (documented, procedural, or factual) is important, it is often tacit knowledge that comes into play in the face of constant change. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge earned from experiences, an acquired and embodied understanding of how things work or relate with people (Polanyi, 1962). Tacit knowledge provides an evolving frame of reference for how people interact around their social milieu inside and outside the digital environment. Tacit knowledge according to Tevjan Pettinger (2017), falls outside the scope of traditional education as emphasis is more on the acquisition of explicit knowledge. Given the apparent importance of tacit knowledge to participation in the knowledge economy, how can nurturing of tacit knowledge be more embedded in formal education? The authors’ premise is that design provides a useful platform for growing capital in tacit knowledge that empowers students’ participation in the 21^st century.

Tacit knowledge is accumulated through experience, through knowing (theoria), doing (praxis), and making (poesis) (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). Interestingly, knowing, doing, and making define the practice of design. By engaging in these processes, it is possible to develop an inquiring, critical disposition and arrive at embodied, relational understandings which constitute tacit knowledge (Pourchier, 2010). The authors do not advocate that everyone should become design expert, but rather to build design literacy as an enabler of increasing tacit knowledge capital through designerly ways of knowing (Cross, 1982) and designerly ways of thinking (Pacione, 2010), especially in higher education curricula.

The higher education sector is of particular interest. Graduate attributes include inquiry and critical thinking or managing complex information and problem-solving skills (Fahnert, 2015), all of which encompass designerly ways of thinking. If the goal of higher education is to produce graduates who are not only employable in the digital age but who are also able to participate and contribute to society and the knowledge economy, then design literacy and the designerly ways of thinking it engenders is imperative.

This article consists of four parts: Part 1: Design and the underpinnings of literacy, Part 2: Building a collaborative mindset with participatory culture, Part 3: Building an empathic mindset with design thinking, and Part 4: Importance of design literacy in higher education. The article aims to contribute to the discourse of design literacy as an emerging research study in the field of education.