“The most fundamental experimental question is “What if?” ” - Donal Schon, The Reflective Practitioner

Collaborative building wireframes for a digital platform to promote conversations amongst educators, parents and public in general, in the context of NEP 2020: A design challenge to initiate reading and interpreting educational policies for advocacy (PC: Padmini Nagaraja)

Vision

Design practices are increasingly coming under scrutiny for the most pressing concerns of the 21st century world, that of ecological crisis, socio-political ideologies, cultural shifts and power relations. This place demands and expectations on design education of how it enables practitioners and researchers in the field: to navigate complex realities, interrogate established notions, revitalizing and reconfiguring their own practice to spearhead both transformation for themselves and within the world.

The one-year Postgraduate Diploma Program in Design Education at Srishti Manipal Institute introduces the field to aspiring practitioners into educational thinking integrated with design thinking processes and critiques of design. Graduates of the program can pursue postgraduate degree programs in design education or allied fields. The program invites designers, DIYers (do-it-yourself) and DIWOers (do-it-with-others), curators, hackers, gamers, artists, digital natives, storytellers, travellers and critical and creative thinkers to prepare and contribute to the world of design education and design in education.

Srishti Manipal envisages the Postgraduate Diploma in Design Education as an integrated and synergistic practice of research, creativity, and education. India's unique ecosystem of creative industries, craft traditions, living heritages and plural cultures of living, making and being offers invaluable opportunities to nurture reflective, ecologically responsive, and creative professional practitioners and researchers in art and design fields.

This program is for those who seek to meet the dynamic and changing needs of learning societies and a vehicle for supporting their critical and reflective practice. Therefore, the vision is to develop and enhance professionals, researchers and practitioners who are:

• lifelong inquirers about their self and practice
• designers of new learning worlds
• creative innovators within emerging design research and educational paradigms and frameworks
• active and networked members in communities of critical and reflective practitioners and,
• seekers of personal mastery

This course is led by the questions:
How do we enable critiques of ideas and practices and an imaginative inquiry in design education and design in education?
How do we go beyond personal and professional schisms, discourses of scale, efficiency, and outcomes in formal and informal settings of education?
How do we nurture within ourselves a consciousness to adapt, embrace uncertainties, become facilitators, and leaders of transformation?

The course is relevant to anyone currently working in areas concerned with communities of learning be it government and civil services, education providers, policy makers, foundations working with CSR, edupreneurs both in formal and non-formal sectors, teachers and heads of department in schools and colleges, educational start-ups and NGOs. It includes practitioners in allied educational fields such as museums, interpretation centres, galleries, zoos, publishing houses and content and creative designers for textbooks and other educational materials.

Course Structure

• Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary studios
• Workshops
• Seminars
• Lines of Inquiries (Field work, Case Studies, Investigations, individual or Group Projects, Transdisciplinary Research)
• Theory and Understanding
• Independent Study
• Open Elective
• Practice
• Exhibitions
• Culminating Performances of Understanding (Portfolio, Transdisciplinary research, Projects, Colloquium, Capstone/Dissertation)
• Knowledge Enhancement (ability or skills)

Learning Approaches

Learning at the postgraduate level is driven by published lines of inquiries that is enacted through studio-based learning, workshops, theoretical reflections, and field work. This approach is grounded in setting and pursuing a personal vision towards practice as mastery.

• Making, Mindfulness and Reflective Practice
• Compassionate, Critical and Collaborative Learning Communities
• Interdisciplinary and Trans-disciplinary Approaches
• Personal and Professional Mastery

Capability Sets

Upon successful completion of this course graduates will have developed the following capabilities:

• Generative learning (e.g. conceptual sketches, prototypes, journals, discussion forums, digital platforms, portfolios, podcasts, videocasts, construction of proto-theory etc) through questions, drawings, play, dialogues, reason, imagination, beauty and aesthetics.
• Adapt and self- revitalise by seeking new experiences, engaging with diverse traditions of thought, experiment and reconfigure own practice
• Go beyond vulnerabilities by setting & sustaining personal purpose, goals & vision pertinent to own reality, in formal and informal settings
• Practice inclusive and humanising pedagogies through participative approaches (facilitation, co-design, co-create & DIWO) and emergent and wholeness disposition versus end driven

Opportunities

Graduates of the Postgraduate Diploma in Design Education course will have a wide range of opportunities:

Higher Education Sector

• Pursue advance master’s program at Srishti and other design institutes
• Design Educators in Design Colleges and Institutions
• Lectures/ Professors/Institutional Leaders
• Curriculum Designers/ Instructional Designers

Non-formal Education Sector (in formal and informal learning centres, art & craft collectives, environmental organizations, publishing houses etc) as

• Content Developers
• Program Developers
• Facilitators

Corporate/for-profit education sector (publishing houses, training units, entrepreneurial ventures in the fields of digital platforms & applications) as

• Content Developers
• Developers of Education materials and toolkits
• Institutional Designers
• Instructional Designers
• Trainers

Within the Public Sector

• policy and decision makers
• human resource developers
• public education government officials

People

Enquiries

Disciplinary Intersections

This pathway is informed by the following learning disciplines:

Research and Collaboration

The pathway in Design in Education course offers its students opportunities to connect with artists and designers from a range of research and practice labs and centres based at Srishti Manipal. These include:

Students will also have opportunities to intersect with partner organizations working in areas such as environmental conservation, tangible and intangible cultural heritage, stories and place as pedagogies, oral histories and more.