Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

The aesthetic imperative frames a pedagogical approach to design education. Through a deliberate exercising of the poetic sensibility, it offers a way to engage and develop the authentic creative self. This intentional practice considers how creative responses are understood and activated through an elevation of the felt condition. The resulting ‘aesthetic imperative as approach’ engages the combined vectors of affect, meaning, value, and ethics. Traditional models abstract the design process into processual pathways but fail to include the inherent need for meaning-making, and value. As with most professional education models, the larger concerns of human investigation are seen as an inconvenience, and their philosophical underpinnings as being a distraction to the project of learning. An alternative pedagogy offers an extension to the model-based design process in the studio discourse. It suggests that creative immersion is best effected through the cultivation of the innate aesthetic self. Its effects are evidenced in the ways in which the person is not independent of professional capacity but is instead an integrated epistemological entity. The value of this is in the deep humanising of educational systems. In bringing this method to the classroom, is a recognition of the student as having both creative and moral agency. It offers a values-based lens to teaching in addition to a competence-based one. It delivers an interpretive method to the centuries-old intuitive acknowledgement that teachers often teach more than simply the curriculum. Through the narratives of design studios, thesis supervisions, and design research projects, the parsing of the method is discussed via both artefact and testimony. Artefacts demonstrate design capacity, thereby validating the method. Reflections reveal that besides professional ability, this pedagogic method offers a way to construct a deliberate aesthetic practice as a critical component to the practice of everyday life.