The first author had the privilege to examine master’s dissertations, as well as doctoral theses on design and design-related topics presented at six universities in South Africa. He furthermore supervised postgraduate students at four universities and served on a variety of postgraduate and ethics committees. This exposure and access to various examination reports and postgraduate assessment criteria provide an informed perspective of the scope, depth and outcomes of, as well as the assessment practices surrounding postgraduate studies in South Africa. Examination reports from examiners outside South Africa are, in general, more favourable with mark allocation than the examination reports issued by South African examiners.

Although calls to decolonise education can be seen as threats to replace existing curricula they can also be seen as an opportunity to scrutinise what is valued in design education and how this might be impacted by calls to decolonise. In this paper, which makes use of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Maton 2010a, 2014) to identify the underlying knowledge-knower structure of graphic design assessment, the significance of a specialist gaze for disciplines such as design is outlined. The gaze (Maton 2014) provides knowers with access to the valued knowledge of the discipline and in disciplines such as graphic design is essential to being able to recognise good and bad design and to make the decisions required in the design process.

This paper explores the relationship between Indian aesthetics, ethics and performance art by engaging  in  the  process,  the  cultural  influences  and  application  of  aesthetic  judgments  on performance artists.  A predominantly western aesthetic judgment is applied to artworks created and the application of an alternative as rasa aesthetics in terms of ethics will be discussed.

Repurposing images has become an integral part of the ideation phase of fashion design processes. The use of online images presents both a challenge and an opportunity for fashion design students who use images of others to communicate a design concept through mood boards. The challenge pertains to the authenticity of their design concepts.

Although the authors of this paper acknowledge the importance of referencing of visual material as a strategy to prevent plagiarism, the argument is made that compilation of mood boards with existing images can be further explored, especially with regard to the accountability of an individual in relation to the concept authenticity.

An area that currently challenges and will continue to challenge design education in the future is that of assessment. Current research in design assessment has identified approaches such as a holistic assessment, designed to evaluate product, person and process (de le Harpe et al., 2009) and authentic assessment both of which move towards a more learner-centered and process concentrated approach. With these changes come new challenges for design educators to substantiate and validate what they do when it comes to the assessment of student work.

Over the last two decades we have seen the designer‘s role and brief broaden. Through the introduction of the personal computer, the Internet and wireless technology and social networking, we all have experienced dramatic changes, especially in our rapport with space, time, the physicality of objects, and ourselves as individuals. Today, with the expansion in student numbers and a reducing resource in Higher Education how the studio-based design pedagogic community responds and adapts its teaching and learning methodologies in response to these rapid developments and effectively utilises feedback opportunities to inform curriculum is key in ensuring that students understand and are equipped for the profession they are entering.

This paper investigates how prospective fashion design students at a University of Technology are required to reflect an understanding of the process of design and the process of construction in their sketches, which are a component of the portfolio they submit for evaluation. I begin by outlining how the portfolio guidelines initiate the anomaly between two desired requirements of novelty and originality / creativity versus the technical / conformity. I reveal how the portfolio requirements encourage students to conform from the onset and argue that this is because the fashion design program continues to train undergraduates to service a traditional and conservative mass market.

This paper seeks to extend Donald Schön’s often-referenced and widely-accepted observations that design, specifically architectural design, is a reflective “conversation with materials” consisting of a cyclical process of “reflection-in-action”. Specifically, the paper argues for the extended applicability of these observations to the question of analysis of existing architecture.

Assessment in education is often seen as only the grading or final evaluation of a completed task performed by the student. Assessment and feedback opportunities can easily be overlooked as design and process are inseparable. How can it be monitored other than with assessment? This paper aims to outline the importance of integration between assessment and the design process, as assessment has various possibilities and varieties, just as the design process consists of a complex sequence of investigations.