In exploring the significance of metropolitan open space systems in building meaningful city brands, the researcher utilised Visual Narrative Inquiry to explore the opinions, perceptions and lived experiences of Durban residents and its’ metropolitan open space system. As a design-based practitioner, the researcher grappled with finding suitable ‘meaning-making’ methodologies that would answer to both the academic rigour required of a master’s dissertation as well as their own needs to visually make sense of the ideas, theories, models, and metrices.

Postgraduate students in South Africa and other developing nations face substantial hurdles in completing their research, despite efforts to boost research output and garner subsidies from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). Key issues include research capacity development and supervision burdens. The potential of conversational AIs, like ChatGPT, as research assistants, has been discussed, but more research needs to be focused on using ChatGPT to support novice and student researchers, especially within resource-poor Global South contexts. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can support the scientific research process, assisting in generating research questions, developing methodology, creating experiments, analysing data, and writing manuscripts.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a key driver of innovation across all sectors and in education it has the power to optimise teaching and learning to benefit educators and students alike. However, the increasing prominence and influence of AI in domains previously exclusive to humans, such as design, raises urgent questions about the assessment of learning in design education. Recent writings in the field of design education agree that in the age of AI, educators need to revisit existing assessment practices. Conversations about AI and assessment practices appear to revolve around upholding academic integrity and defining what should be assessed when students can create design outcomes using generative AI.

In the 2021 publication, 'The Ontology of Design Research', Miguel Angel Herrera Batista argues that the ongoing development of postgraduate programmes in design has led to a growing focus on establishing the field of inquiry as an independent and differentiated research area. For design research to contribute to disciplinary development, researchers need to focus not only on procedural rigour but also on ensuring that the philosophical foundations of selected methodological approaches align with the ontological reality of design. It is, therefore, necessary to encourage postgraduate students to investigate both familiar and novel research methodologies in the search for appropriate approaches to design research projects.

This paper aims to propose and motivate further research in the sphere of Interior Design education in a private college environment in South Africa. The study focuses on finding strategies that motivate for student-staff partnership and collaborative learning in the theory subject of Critical Studies (CS) within a hybrid/online learning environment. The discussion takes the reader on a journey of analysis and discussion starting with traditional method of education and alternative pedagogies; the value of critical thinking skills in the twenty-first century and research based-education. The emphasis is on Critical Theory in Higher Education (HE) as a valuable drive in stimulating self-reflection that produces graduates that are contributing members to our society.

The urgent need for pedagogical change, made possible by Digital Transformation (DT), is indisputable in design education (DE). This study considers the relationship between the evolution of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and the need for modernised pedagogy suitable for learning DE online, particularly by African students. The focus of the investigation is on the methods used in delivering DE curricula in relation to these technological platforms. This is carried out using a qualitative research approach with a phenomenological analysis framework. A conceptual model is constructed to explain the phenomena of interest. The research process reflects a constructivist epistemological paradigm based on the direct experiences and perspectives of the participants.

This paper reports on a qualitative case study exploring design student reflections about their experiences of a transdisciplinary online collaboration in a real-world learning project implemented in October 2020. The spread of a global pandemic that caused a primary and rapid shift from a contact-based learning model to fully fledged online teaching marked the year and learning for student participants. Applying an interpretivist paradigm, the researchers thematically analysed reflection essays from a sample of thirty-two design students to expose dominant perceptions.

Keeping participants anonymous is a core principle in research ethics and accepted as international best practice. In this paper, we consider ways of improving the ethical quality of visual communication research in the ‘new normal’ situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we use an argumentative discourse approach to discuss issues and concerns surrounding anonymity from a principlist perspective. The first section provides an orientation on international best practices and core research ethics principles. The second section reflects on South African research ethics committees, their functions, and the poor fit between a health research-orientated approach and research in art and design departments.

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.

As the interview as a method of data gathering has gained in popularity in the disciplines of art and design, templates of consent letters are generated in their hundreds, and the absence of a duly signed document  —  in  a  research  output  using  humans  as  a  source  of  data  —  usually  renders  the undertaking unethical and invalid. However, in the rush to protect the institution and its agents against litigation, it is perhaps forgotten that the signing of the obligatory letter is only a first, technical, step in a personal encounter between individuals.

This paper reports on a project named Platform 6, which was designed to facilitate teacher development and thereby to develop teachers as scholars. Initiated within the context of Boyer’s Scholarship of Engagement (1991), Platform 6 is a training programme and awareness drive devised for secondary school design teachers on the pedagogy of teaching design thinking and practice.

The exploratory first leg of Platform 6 was limited to a sample of National Senior Certificate (NSC) schools in the Western Cape. Qualitative-exploratory research methodology was employed to gain real world insight about the teaching and learning environment of design teachers in South Africa. It was useful to understand the dynamics of design teaching in grades 10 to 12 in Western Cape schools.