Guides
Design research methods for beginners: lessons from conference papersFor early-career scholars in Australia, the path into design research can feel like navigating a sprawling campus of competing methodologies. The conference…
How hand drafting and digital modelling shape entry-level design studentsWalk into a first-year design studio in Melbourne, Brisbane, or Perth and you will see a quiet split. One half works with tracing paper and 0.5mm clutch…
Visual Thinking Strategies for First-Year Design StudentsIn foundation design studios across Australia, lecturers are reshaping how beginners look before they draw. Visual Thinking Strategies, often shortened to VTS,…
Designing Foundation Courses from a Quarter-Century of Conference PapersThe NCBDS Conference Archive holds more than two decades of proceedings focused on beginning design education, offering lecturers, tutors, and curriculum…
Learning Together In First-Year Design StudiosBeginning design education often asks students to solve unfamiliar problems before they have developed a shared vocabulary for critique, research or making.…
Teaching proportion and scale to novice designersProportion and scale are often introduced as if they were simple matters of measurement. For beginning designers, however, the difficulty lies in connecting…
Examining portfolios in foundation design educationPortfolios play a distinctive role in foundation design courses. They gather sketches, models, experiments, written reflections and resolved outcomes into a…
Gender and diversity in beginning design educationThe NCBDS Conference Archive offers a valuable way to examine how beginning design education has changed over the past 25 years. Its digitised conference…
Why play belongs in early design educationPlay gives beginning designers permission to explore before they know the right answer. Through making, testing, rearranging and imagining, students learn that…
How to scaffold complexity in a first-year design studioA first-year design studio asks students to manage unfamiliar tools, new vocabulary, collaborative critique and open-ended decisions at the same time. The…