Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

• Introduction
• Excellence
• Teaching and Learning
• Further development
  

Manufacturing sectors, such as the automotive industry, used to be based regionally or nationally. This is no longer the case and so to remain competitive the UK needs to progressively secure the value-adding creative design end of the manufacturing business - which can be sourced from anywhere in the world.

Design graduates will therefore have to work on a distributed team basis with colleagues in other countries. Much of this work is likely to be carried out virtually. Coventry University is looking to develop and then disseminate a model for remote working with a more international perspective using the potential of new digital technologies to do so.

In short, through the use of computer technologies, this CETL will enable students to develop their spatial design intelligence within a culturally diverse context and to create a digital studio portfolio which provides access to the community of international industrial design practice.

This is achieved through the:

• creation of effective Digital Interaction Studios
• establishment of an international partners network and processes
• development of integrated approaches to creating studio portfolios and reflective design journals
• strengthening of professional engagement in curriculum design and delivery
• conducting pedagogic research into the development of spatial design intelligence and curriculum internationalisation.
  

Excellence at Coventry rests on three mutually reinforcing attributes:

• a learning experience systematically designed to induct individual students into the ‘community of practice’ of industrial design.
• the high-level of engagement by expert designers from the target industrial sectors in the development and delivery of the curriculum.
• the infusion of the academic staff’s own professional practice experience and applied research into teaching and learning and the development of student project work.

Because learning within a community of practice transforms who a student is, and what a student can do, it is an experience of identity formation. It is not just an accumulation of skills and information, but also a process of becoming – in this case a certain kind of creative and critically minded design practitioner.

Participation in a variety of practical studio-based learning methods is the means by which students develop the technical knowledge, cultural awareness, communal practice and professional design skills and values which eventually constitute the identity of the transport or product design practitioner.

The accumulation of design expertise comes through a pattern of recursiveness and variation by continual studio practice in the physical creation of design solutions.

In order to help our students learn the ‘language of space’ and ‘thinking in the spatial medium’ we require them, through the activities of drawing and modeling, to gain more sophisticated visuo-spatial understandings of the complexity of surfacing and three-dimensional form. Through manipulation of forms in the studio, they acquire ‘threshold concepts’ distinctive to international automotive design, such as double-curvature fluid surfacing. Such concept understandings are eminently portable to other product design industries where they endow our graduates with competitive advantage in the international employment market (for example, many of our Transport Design graduates have become very successful in the design of sports footwear).

With the establishment of this CETL the next step forward will be the use of computer-based modeling and presentation techniques, together with network technologies, to facilitate the sharing in group design activities with fellow design students and design experts from all over the world. To do this we propose to implement the following core actions:

1. creating the Digital Interaction Studios (DIS) that enable trans-national approaches to design problems and their solutions offering opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue
2. establishing processes of working with design students, from a range of cultural backgrounds, together with international professional designers from client industries plus design teachers and learning support staff from other universities around the globe
3. developing an integrated digital approach to the construction of the student studio portfolio together with the keeping of reflective design journals
4. strengthening the engagement with client industries and design practices by the development of approaches to the industrial and educational construction of the professional curriculum within an international community of practice
5. conducting pedagogic research into and disseminating the work of the CETL, with a particular emphasis on the development of spatial design intelligence together with the cultural and other aspects of internationalising the curriculum.

For further information on the work of the Centre of Excellence for Transport and Product Design, visit the CETPD website.

You can also email Gill Holmes.