Exploring futures with world building in design education: building and applying a theoretical model through action research

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2021-2-12
Çağlar, Emre
Design students are often engaged with future contexts, as design education encourages them to explore different contexts and understand the implications of their activities. These explorations are done in what is called a fuzzy front-end in design, which stands for the chaotic but fruitful early phase of a design process. There are different apporaches used by design students to conduct research and increase immersion into the context in this phase. Approaches such as design scenarios, make use of fictional information in addition to factual, in order to increase immersion into context and help design students generate inferential insights. This creates both epistemological and practical challenges in terms of how to define and utilize fiction within the early phases of design. This study draws from the existing literature to utilize world building in this phase. Through action research, three workshops were conducted with design students to generate a theoretical model for presenting how world building is utilized in design education, contributing to the design literature. Furthermore, the toolset devised for use in these workshops is iterated throughout the study based on the insights from the theoretical model, and is presented as a practical contribution to the design education literature. Based on the results, this study presents a case for how world building in design education is carried out in waves of speculation for creating textual reference worlds, and assessment for comparing these speculations with actuality through pragmatic concerns.

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Citation Formats
E. Çağlar, “Exploring futures with world building in design education: building and applying a theoretical model through action research,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2021.