Group Work and the Externally-Oriented Capstone: Opening Students to the Challenges of Professional Practice

Background

The design industry’s expectation for work-ready graduates has long encouraged the use of client-supplied and simulated professional project briefs in tertiary curriculum, but the nature of practice in contemporary creative industries like design is changing. The rise of service industries, the culture of co-creation and the spread of digital technologies have made many established ideas about design practice irrelevant. Designers now need to design from the perspectives of the consumer rather than focusing on the qualities of the designed artefact. Clients and employers expect a steady stream of design invention geared to commercial and social contexts in a state of flux. Communication design and digital media design are fields focused on conceptual and stylistic invention, but entrenched beliefs in designers’ innate creativity, intuitive understanding of the design task and myth of the designer as lone creative genius, have made both fields resistant to new approaches such as user-centred design, with its requirement to base design on knowledge of people’s situation and preferences.

Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary professional practice is increasingly the norm in design with the rise of projects delivered across multiple platforms, both digital and print. Designers typically work in teams, engaging in the brainstorming, banter, critical feedback, discussion and negotiation that drives the process of conceptualisation, proposal making, design development and implementation, reflecting growing understanding that creativity is mostly a collective process (Sawyer, 2007). A design program that lacks group work, especially in its final year, misrepresents contemporary design practice. The capstone projects discussed here challenged students to connect the heterogeneous requirements, approaching their project as emerging from a community of practice in which differences of knowledge, meaning and practice must be actively brokered.