Growing Understanding
Teaching Sustainability in Design Practice-based Programs: Connecting Pedagogy to the Learning Experience
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Johnnie Stark, Barbara Trippeer
Education for Sustainable Design (ESD) requires a comprehensive systems approach to higher education design practice-based course and curriculum development. Internationally recognized agencies stress the current need for ESD to address climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and public health impacts. In practice-based design programs, curriculum maintenance is complex, addressing more than individual class structures, and continuously evolving through ongoing assessment not only of students’ comprehension but also ensuring content relevant to the designated practice discipline and positive environmental outcomes. Teachers in practice-based programs must strike a balance between constructivist pedagogies supporting students creating their own knowledge to the detriment of not acquiring best practice knowledge, and cognitive-based or “instructivist” delivery methods that can discourage innovation. In the context of ongoing research in interdisciplinary sustainable design education, this paper focuses on the teachers’ comprehensive pedagogical role across course design and curriculum strategies including the position of the student within the class experience. Studies have shown that design students learn in many ways, with an individual often employing multiple styles. Learning styles are informed by perceptual modalities, information processing methods, and personality models. Studio class teaching methods, appropriate for practice-based programs and for accommodating learning style diversity, include Kolb’s Learning Styles, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, and Active Learning course structures which are not confined to one theory. This research showcases how teachers have responded robustly to sustainable design education utilizing a variety of active learning strategies including project-based learning, service learning, participatory action research (PAR), and interdisciplinary or cross disciplinary collaborative learning.
Sustainable Design for Healthy Communities: Applying Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences to a Service-learning Case Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Trippeer, Johnnie Stark
Growing concerns regarding climate change and diminishing resources have prompted educators to adjust their teaching practices. However, addressing these complex concerns effectively in the classroom remains challenging, especially with regards to accommodating diverse student learning modalities. This analysis proposes Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences (GTMI) as a comprehensive model for exploring students' sustainability skills in the current educational landscape. Through evaluation of the studio course Sustainable Design for Healthy Communities (SDHC) as a case study, this paper outlines the purpose of our study, the methods employed in our course design, and the potential impact our findings could have on the training of teachers interested in developing design pedagogy related to sustainable development. The SDHC project demonstrates the practicality and effectiveness of GTMI in a real-world context. In this project, fashion design students actively engaged with sustainable development in their local community. The course pedagogy, which employed active learning and reflection cycles, was adapted using Gardner's comprehensive modalities structure, identifying individual needs through ten levels of experiential learning. The researchers used qualitative mixed methods to track the evolution of student outcomes. The findings revealed that students participating in the SDHC project strengthened their sustainability competencies and demonstrated increased pro-environmental behaviors. This study demonstrates a practical application of GTMI through the SDHC project as a case study. It proposes GTMI as a tangible solution to enhance students' sustainability competencies and foster behavioral change by deliberately focusing on both the teacher and the student's roles in active learning and evidence-based curriculum.
Music Videos : Design beyond Print and User Interfaces
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Neil Ward
To help students expand their knowledge beyond a traditional graphic design programs focus on print and user interfaces, I taught a three-week January term course focusing on music videos. The course began with a visual history of music videos, using YouTube playlists as a reference. Students were assigned out-of-class projects that each focused on different themes of music video production, such as choreography, lighting, lip-syncing, and visual style. They created storyboards, selected shooting locations to enhance their concepts, captured video, and edited the final product using Adobe Premiere Pro. In-class exercises like group choreography (the "Stairwell Shuffle") and lighting experiments (set to Justin Bieber's Beauty and a Beat) helped them learn the principles and also loosened them up. This help bolster their confidence to perform on screen in front of their peers. For many students, this was their first experience using body movement and physical expression to convey a concept. They were immersed in a creative world of narration, storytelling, costumes, storylines, glamour, and choreography, building on and moving beyond traditional design basics like image, text, color, and pattern to develop a fuller expression of their ideas. This paper reviews the initial course planning, pedagogy, successes and challenges, learning outcomes, student feedback, and showcase a selection of music videos produced by the students.
Reshaping UX Design Education for AI Agent-driven Multimodal Solutions: A New UX Design Approach in the Era of Advanced AI Models
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Min Kang
The evolution of AI technologies—encompassing large language models (LLMs), compound AI systems, and large multimodal models (LMMs)—is reshaping the landscape of UX design. These advancements enable AI agents to achieve deeper context awareness by integrating diverse data streams, such as text, images, and voice, to deliver tailored, real-time solutions. To prepare future designers for these challenges, UX design education must evolve, equipping students with the skills to design adaptive, ethical, and user-centered AI-driven systems. This paper introduces a reimagined educational framework for UX design that emphasizes human-AI collaboration and multimodal interaction design. By teaching students to design systems where AI agents leverage LMMs for rich context understanding, the framework prepares them to create personalized, intuitive, and dynamic solutions. The curriculum integrates cutting-edge tools and techniques, empowering students to address challenges like transparency, adaptability, and system-level coherence in their designs. Two case studies—an AI-driven medication management system for older adults and an AI-supported creative workflow assistant—will be briefly introduced to illustrate how this approach can be applied. These examples demonstrate the potential of multimodal AI agents to address complex user needs, from improving accessibility to streamlining creative processes. This study offers educators practical strategies for updating UX curricula to reflect the opportunities and challenges of advanced AI models. We offer insights into fostering the next generation of designers equipped to lead the development of impactful, multimodal AI solutions for diverse domains.
