Abstract
University students arrive in design classrooms with mental models about how the world around them works. Increasingly, these students’ mental models abdicate to paradigms created by global technology and social media companies, instead of being built from a vast and variable array of learnings about the world based on one’s local context and individuated experiences. This phenomenon is not new, but its implications are starting to be seen by companies that place design at the forefront of their value model. How can design education create an environment where an individual’s curiosity and learning don’t depend on the pervasive narratives of a few large companies, but rather on rich and specific insights about the world? Developing insights in this way has the potential to solve truly important problems large entities ignore. To experiment with ways to generate this type of curiosity and thought, we created a space at the University of Toledo called Axon Lab, housing our Foundations of Art Studio Technology course. The course and the lab are a haven for the subversion of dominant thought processes that pervade our world. The key ongoing experiment in the course is the Tool Project, wherein students design a tool that works to solve a problem they identified in their own lives, or the lives of people close to them. Using the cumulative understanding of shop tools, mechanisms, and materials from the course, they prototype and create a tool, answering a real design problem—not one constructed for them by a distant corporation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Tools, Education, Individual Design, Seeing, Observation, Hands-on-Learning, Process, Mateirals
