Design education has an integral association with engaging both critical and creative thinking. While the previous critical cross-field outcomes explicitly fostered both critical and creative development (SAQA 2000), the newer level descriptors (SAQA 2012) focus almost exclusively on critical thinking. This could be because critical and creative thinking are often regarded as synonymous. Authors like Macat International Limited (2017) support this understanding by including creative thinking as a component of critical thinking, while other authors differentiate between the two concepts.

My doctoral research critically explored design education in South African higher education through employing post-qualitative methodology. The research was approached from new materialist, posthuman theoretical perspectives. This implied that I set out to practise design research/education aimed at productive transformation in the institution that I work. I critically negotiated a range of individual experiences of being engaged in design/research/teaching in the Visual Communication Design curriculum at Stellenbosch University.

Despite the development of Practice-Led Research (PLR) to acknowledge the centrality of practice in the pursuit of research outcomes, the methodology still seems to be confined by the necessity to separate out the cognitive/conscious processes (of writing, for example) from the phenomenological and body/mind dynamics at play in the creative process. This confinement seems to be a product of duality or a binary research system as espoused in the West. The central thesis of this paper, therefore, is to attempt to demonstrate a potential strategy that circumvents or collapses this dichotomy. This paper sets a triadic relationship between/among practice-led research, Kasulis’ (2002) theorising of intimacy in understanding, and the eastern philosophy of Rasa, in the pursuit of wisdom.

This paper is a supervisor reflection on theory selection for research design in design-orientated research. Selection and deployment of theory in a research design can powerfully affect what design research achieves. The research design of a graphic design master’s dissertation targeting ‘research for design’ illustrates this. The view of research design discussed in the paper is not typological or logistical, but instead one where relations between research components are interactive and emergent during the course of the study.

In Christopher’s Frayling’s seminal account of design-orientated research, he lists research for design, research through design and research about design as the primary modes of research in the field of design. At least since Frayling termed these concepts in 1993, design educators globally have grappled with supervising research through design. While there are many accounts of research through design, few provide clear theory as to how the approach may be applied, least of all in design education. In the field of human-computer interaction, Zimmerman et al.

Research ethics committees (RECs) at universities evaluate applications for ethical clearance through ethical research lenses shaped by positivist and interpretivist paradigms and cultural constructivist thinking. Such lenses predominantly follow reasoning strategies that could include inductive or deductive reasoning. Research ethics committees further interrogate applicants’ methodology and monitor their actions to determine whether they meet extant research ethics principles.

South African students in higher education face many challenges other than the requirements of the academic programme. This places additional demands on academic staff tasked with delivering specialised content in support of student success rates. In response, we have introduced a subject intended to support first-year design students in navigating studio and theory subjects in a trans-disciplinary way. This subject covers academic, personal and professional literacies. Personal and professional literacies are the subject of this investigation, in which we question how we can support students in preparation for fast-changing future environments?

The paper proceeds from the perspective that to decolonise education one needs to start from the position of decolonising research as practice. It proceeds to argue that to attempt to enter the halls of research to decolonise it, one needs, indeed, to decolonise the pursuits of research which are the pursuits of knowledge. A central domain of this pursuit lies in the notion of Africa-centred knowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that designers sit in the cusp or at the forefront of decolonised research endeavours, as they pursue human flourishing (instead of ‘research’) and the search for practical wisdom (or phronesis) instead of knowledge.

Research in the creative arts for qualification purposes has developed since the late 1980’s to include creative practice as aspects of both methodology and outputs. The nature of the creative process, and what has been deemed as useful to artist/designer academics, has resulted in many research projects driven by a single researcher, addressing problems of practice from a subjective perspective, with the researcher and the researcher’s actions becoming both the object and subject of the research. This kind of research does not involve other participants and is therefore seemingly precluded from ethical discussion.

As the focus of design broadens to include problem solving located in complex societal systems the emphasis in design education must shift accordingly. Knowledge of and competence in conducting research within the scope of design practice, and using insights gained from research to conceptualise appropriate solutions is a necessity that design students urgently require.  In support of this need, this paper  will  introduce  and  describe  the  Firma  Model,  a  meta-framework  that  spans  the  human- centered design process, which aims to assist the design student and educator in grappling with complex problems.