IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

During the recent shifts the pandemic triggered, academia and the industry – reevaluated the methodologies to overcome the demanding situations. On academia side, variety of setbacks and challenging impositions such as remote learning and not being able to work hands-on with projects were surfaced. On the industry side, the ‘new unknown’ or the uncertainty for what the future holds in terms of implementing remote-working scenarios and keep the efficiency while getting new generation of designers who lost almost two years of their time without workshop and hands-on experience caused a lot of drawbacks. This research is intended to focus on these developments with academia-industry collaborations in design field and examines different methodologies and pedagogies for academia to cope with the emerging trends and demands of the industry. This will be backed up by a case study to provide a framework for a transitional model that integrates online education and virtual interaction opportunities with real world industry scenarios during pandemic-driven education shift to provide academia and the industry with efficient and adaptable environments that is aimed to reduce the hardship of not being able to interact in-person while working/collaborating. Some of these hardships brought new perspectives to the academics and the students to cope with different drawbacks by implementing new or revised methodologies in design thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and interaction. Design education needs to respond to the increasing complexity and systemic transformations of the professional realm by staying progressive and innovative with a dynamic outlook which keeps morphing swiftly. Embracing new movements and trends within technological, social, and cultural domains are becoming key factors to the progressiveness of academia. This research also aims to analyze these domains which could benefit a transitional design education model to adapt to the changing educational needs.