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Teaching Visual Design Thinking: Introduction

This paper presents a way to teach visual design thinking that is currently used to structure a foundation level University course entitled Visual Thinking. The Visual Thinking course is a core course for digital media, and product design based learning concentrations within the Engineering Technology Department at East Tennessee State University. Students who take this course typically have little to no formal art, design, or technology training.

In this design based learning course, students are introduced to visual art principles, a two to three dimensional design process, and digital media technology tools. The course is relevant to engineering educators in that it combines art, design, and technology education. The course incorporates lessons from historic predecessor courses including: Technical Illustration, Engineering Drawing, and Industrial Illustration. Even though computer aided design, drafting, and rendering programs have replaced the above career fields; it is important that students learn their fundamental traditional methods as they are essential towards empowering their visual design thinking skills. Therefore, to prepare students for today’s entry level career opportunities, the course strategically integrates traditional artistic techniques and technical engineering graphics methods with modern day software tools and digital methods.

The course primarily seeks to provide students with: an applied understanding of visual design process stages, conceptualization, and computational visualization methods. The practical design process stages provide students with a structured way to visually learn and practice the art of design in a scientific or organized manner. The concept ideation and formation methods provide students with traditional visual mapping and concept sketching skills. The digital production methods provide students with computational tools and methods for developing ideas in 3D.

As the second in a series of papers describing ways to teach design (Wronecki, 2004) this paper outlines seven major design process stages and the corresponding visual thinking methods associated with each stage. In the course, these process stages and visual steps are used to structure and facilitate a semester long, student-directed, teacher-facilitated design project in which students are asked to design an innovative, inventive, or inspirational idea. Students are free to choose a project focus in their area of interest. Students in the Digital Media program tend to choose topics such as: character, product, and game design, and architectural, interior, and environmental visualization. Self motivation, individuation, and actualization are pedagogical drivers that dramatically improve the students’ work ethic and academic performance.

Scope The scope of this paper is intended to provide an outline of a design process and to describe visual thinking methods contained within. Therefore, the main goal of this research paper is to simply communicate the author’s approach towards teaching design. The results of this experimental research are by no means conclusive. Therefore, this paper neither substantiates nor validates the systematic methods contained within. However, some measure of assessing student performance when using the following methods can be ascertained by empirically peer reviewing examples of student design projects at the paper’s presentation session.

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Wronecki, J. (2007, June), Teaching Visual Design Thinking Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2129