Guides
Designing Effective Beginner Design ExercisesDesigning for design students is a curious exercise in itself. The instincts that make a strong practitioner — comfort with ambiguity, willingness to revise,…
Visual literacy across art and design in foundation educationWhen students enter tertiary creative study, they encounter a peculiar tension. Visual art emphasises expression and open-ended inquiry, while design…
Writing as a tool for thinking in beginning design coursesFor decades, beginning design education has been described as a place where students think through making. Writing has often appeared as an afterthought, added…
Teaching Design Process Through Lessons From The ArchiveDesign education often presents the process as a neat sequence: investigate, define, generate, test and refine. In practice, beginning designers move back and…
Off the Page and Into the Street: Field Trips in First-Year DesignBeginning design studios have always wrestled with a peculiar problem: how do you teach students to see when the world they are asked to interpret sits on a…
Building a toolkit for teaching design fundamentalsTeaching design fundamentals involves more than presenting a set of principles. Beginning students need repeated opportunities to observe, frame, generate,…
How Conference Papers Chart the Evolution of Design Software EducationThe NCBDS Conference Archive preserves more than two decades of proceedings from gatherings where design educators exchanged methods, tools and philosophies.…
Addressing anxiety and imposter syndrome in beginning designersWalk into any first-year studio in Melbourne in week one and you encounter a spectrum of confidence. Some arrive with strong folio work from secondary school…
Nature as a Teacher in Foundation Design StudiosAcross Australian architecture and design schools, foundation-year studios are rediscovering the bushland, tide pools and outback light that surround their…
From drawing to model: transitional exercises in beginning designWhen a first-year student holds a pencil confidently but freezes before a sheet of foam core, the gap between two-dimensional drafting and three-dimensional…