Designing The Enhanced Student Experience In Design Institutions

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Swati Chopra, Dr. Claudia Rebola, Braden Trauth, Micheal Roller
University of Cincinnati

Designing The Enhanced Student Experience In Design Institutions

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The education mission of college and university is multifaceted – on the instructional side, the design program aims to deliver rich, broad range formal foundational, aesthetic and analytical knowledge and skills – while ensuring that student success rate is at its highest. Apart from the conventional measure of student success, measured by formative and summative assessments, there is now a great deal of focus on student’s mental well-being and on the psychological attributes. A recent study by Beiter et al., correlated stress, anxiety, and depression with academic performance and showed that the pressure to succeed and post-graduation were the main concerns of students during their academic years. (Beiter, et al, 2015)

Design cohort shares these commonalities, and on top, students experience creativity, originality, problem-solving and artistic challenges. The current pedagogical approach in design schools results in high pressure on the students. Students are constantly worried about submissions, concept generation, time-management, and, are all the time questioning their self-worth, causing the student undergoing stress, depression, and burn-outs. During this the creativity is phased out, and, blandness enters in both their mind and in their creative output. This becomes a question of their well-being vs. work performance. All-nighters are a common practice, caused by procrastination and creative blocks.

Universities offer academic support in the form of student success centers so students can become confident and independent learners. The center spaces provide a friendly, inviting space to study, learn and collaborate. Typical examples of such resources are the math center and writing center, which help students with math homework and writing resources. The challenges faced by design students differ from those conventional subjects of study. The field of design requires creativity which can stem from many stimuli in the surrounding world. Creativity lacks specific form and structure – it is indefinable – hence challenging to solve and address.

The aim of this paper is to research and identify challenges faced by design students during their academic term along with their psychological state as it relates to the design/learning process, and, to offer a platform for attaining sustainable and enriched student experience in the design field. The methodology uses current and modified theoretical and methodological research and work analysis to understand and build supporting design a system that enhances the student academic experience. The

new approach discussed here focusses on multiple aspects of user-encountered problems and how with Participatory & Service design-solutions can be obtained. The paper is structured as follows: in section (2) we describe our data-collection method to generate a list of pain points identified by students as the opportunity areas of improvement in their design education; in section (3) we describe an application named “design therapy” which is the proposed solution to help students have a better, positive and healthier student experience, followed by summary in section 4.

Year: 2018