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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The Higher Education (HE) system faces the challenges of
providing a holistic education to the future designers,
enabling them the capacity to approach the increasingly
complex socio-technic problems. The challenge seems
aggravated by the accelerated digitalization of education.
However, digital technological mediums, such as Virtual
Reality (VR), offers unique effective contributions to many
educational settings. VR enables real-time and intuitive
interactions, in synthetic 3D worlds, where artificial
experiences tend to produce the same effect as the real ones,
depending on the immersive capacity of the VR system.
Immersive VR (iVR) is expected to become more important
and prominent, opening more possibilities for VR to expand
its potential to influence and redefine culture. The problem
then arises of how digital technology will impact the
teaching in design, and particularly, the teaching-learning of
Basic Design, in all its holistic dimension. The problem then
arises of how digital technology will impact the teaching in
design, and particularly, the teaching-learning of Basic
Design, in all its holistic dimension. In this sense, our study
focuses the questions: In the context of the development of
Basic Design (BD) skills (i.e., the teaching-learning of the
design fundamentals), can, and how can iVR-based tools
contribute to refill HE system its holistic nature and
capacitate designers to address the world’s complex socio technical problems? To approach the question, a set of
studies were implemented following mixed methods
research. The first question to be addressed concerned the
capacity to create, implement and test the impact of a VR based tool on the BD context. Accordingly, a rudimentary
VR-based tool was developed and tested, in the pedagogic
context of a BD-derived curricular unit. Its impact was
assessed on the students’ creativity level; barriers to
creativity; motivation; performance; and emotional state
during the experience. The following study aimed the
identification of the learning outcomes (LOs) that future VR based tools should address, for which a new study was
conducted to recognize BD in the Portuguese HE system, as
well as its most representative learning outcomes (LOs).
Were identified: i) the curricular units that teach DB; ii) the
LOs, defined by their components: levels of understanding and content topics; iii) and the most significant combinations
between those components. Subsequently, was addressed the
question: How can BD reflect its holistic nature in the present
HE system? A conceptual framework-model that connects
the theoretical-philosophical premises of BD and the LOs
was proposed. The conceptual framework-model may enable
the design of holistic BD learning activities, tools and
experiences in general, including the ones that use digital
technology. The final question concerned the expectations of
the BD students to use iVR-based tools for learning the
design fundamentals holistically. An online questionnaire
identified that the expectations of previous BD students to
use the iVR-based tools for several phases of the teaching learning process is high, as well as for performing the LOs,
particularly for surpassing the learning of the most difficult
content topic, 3D form creation. It is therefore proposed that
the conceptual framework-model can be used for assisting
the design of innovative pedagogical tools based on VR, that
supports BD holistic premises, thus contributing to a more
consistent integration of iVR-based tools in BD pedagogy.
Hopefully, this can lead to the acquisition of more and better
skills among design students while reaffirming the holistic
character of the BD teaching-learning process, particularly
when assisted by iVR-based tools.
Description
Keywords
Design Design education Basic design Learning outcomes Immersive virtual reality