Education Papers

IDSA publishes a selection of peer-reviewed academic education papers each year. These are collected during a community-wide open call period when design educators and practitioners submit materials for review by a group of judges serving on IDSA’s Academic Jury. The program also helps provide content for the annual Education Symposium, where some authors are invited to present their work from the stage to a live audience. To view the full Education Papers jury please visit meet the jury page.

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Design Methodology For Building On Embodied Cultural Knowledge
Throughout history and across the world, crafts have drawn inspiration from the beauty of nature and mathematics. Complex, algorithmic patterns can be seen across disciplines from Islamic geometric tiles to Nicaraguan pottery to the architectural forms of Gaudi. While
Lisa Marks
Berea College
To Incorporate The Exploration Of Behavior And Interaction
This study investigates the elements of classic design foundations exercises in light of an increasing need to incorporate product interaction and design for emergent behaviors in the use of products into industrial design foundations. Visual and conceptual design foundations
Magnus Feil
Arizona State University
Industrial design is continuously changing and evolving. In recent years, this change has included the integration of methods from adjacent and complementary disciplines, resulting in the expansion of knowledge and skillset. A traditional approach to industrial design focused on
Alex Lobos and Tim Wood
Rochester Institute of Technology
In 2014, Fast Company published an article entitled “8 Reasons Why Creatives Will Rule the World” (Cooper, 2014). The reasons are interesting, and include hints at how right brainers handle complexity by being adaptive risk takers who understand the
Richard Fry
Brigham Young University
Using Design Control Methodologies To Draw The Line Between User Needs And The Final Product
Industrial designers are an increasingly integral part of medical and healthcare spaces, entering the work stream early in the assessment of user needs. In addition to understanding the needs and requirements of users, understanding the regulatory landscape is imperative
Kelly A Umstead
North Carolina State University
A Framework To Enact A Guerrilla Future
Designing believable future fiction narratives can be a catalyst to provoke discussion and debate with institutional and public audiences and a powerful means of educating critical and reflective designers that question the ethics of what and why we create.
E. Scott Denison
The Ohio State University Department of Design
Workshop Summary And Observations
Empathy is at the core of human centered design and design thinking. Being able to put oneself into someone else’s shoes, truly immersing into the subject matter, discovering the actual issues to be solved is crucial to successful problem finding and
Dan Neubauer, Pete Evans, Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, Betsy Barnhart
Iowa State University
Can Design Process Help Prepare First-generation Students For College?
A critical priority for higher education today is increasing college readiness for low-income, first- generation, and underrepresented minority high school students. College readiness is defined as a student’s preparedness to enroll and succeed at a post-secondary level. Academically, this
Heather Corcoran, Liz Kramer, Hayley Johnston
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis
Improving Multi-disciplinary Collaborations
Collaborating in teams with people with disabilities is a potent way to immerse undergraduate Industrial Design (ID) students in the complexities of human centered design. Students personally witness the exclusion our poorly designed products and environments present to their
Michael McAllister, Kimberly Mollo
The University of the Arts, Thomas Jefferson University
A Writing And Design Process
If writing is a process of thinking, why is it not a critical component of the design studio syllabus? This project was conceived and inspired by the difficulty undergraduate industrial design students experienced writing about their work. Their difficulty,
Andy Law, Christina Galvez
Rhode Island School of Design