This paper will look at the conceptual understandings of design education in South Africa with reference to the Fenwick monogram (2001). Learning, according to Fenwick, is categorised into five perspectives: constructivist, critical cultural, psychoanalytic, situative, and enactivist.

This paper proposes design as the guiding pedagogical metaphor for education in the 21st century. Educational reform literature is preoccupied with notions of indeterminacy in relation to learning because of major social changes that have occurred over the last two decades. Globalization, pluriculturalism, informalisation, consumerism, the rise of the network or information/knowledge based society have increasingly become defining markers of these changes.