<aside> 🔮 This project is part of Deshonesty — my design MFA thesis on documentation and reflection. Visit the interactive thesis site to see this work in greater detail!
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I created this short film + original audio piece to capture the spirit of the course. It features an assemblage of in-class footage, as well as found audio and course assignments from the students themselves.
What happens when we use design methods to reflect on design practice?
A curious and iterative design practice can lead to new understandings of the world, and many disciplines have adopted design-based methodologies for analyzing systems, improving communications, and even teaching students. But even within design education, these reflective skills are often underemphasized in favor of teaching craft. Documentation for Designers is an experimental seminar that supplements existing design curricula by allowing students space to reflect on and learn from their own practice.
In the course, students are led through a series of media-based inquiries and reflective exercises. Each exercise asks students to capture their creative process in a new way (through photos, audio, video, writing) and reflect upon how the documentation process impacts their perceptions of their work. In turn, these inquiries are used to provoke deeper class discussions and reflections about students’ positionalities and ethics in a changing world.
The low-stakes, open-ended assignments allow students to embody their creative practice at a slower pace and a higher altitude than in a conventional studio setting. Classroom culture is warm, curious, and trauma-informed — prioritizing experimentation, process, and connection over individual outcomes. All activities are structured according to culturally-affirming and boundary-affirming guidelines that allow each student to meet the material on their own terms.
More about this project is available here on the Deshonesty thesis site.
In-class photos and videos by Tom Maiorana; conference photos by glenda drew
Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award — UC Davis 2021-22
Savageau Award in Design — UC Davis Department of Design 2022
Faculty Choice poster award — SOTL UC Davis 2021
Course activities were designed to facilitate both introspection and community connection.
Students continually practiced reflecting on — and communicating back — the story of their work.
The structure of Documentation for Designers draws on a number of established theories of learning and interpretation. Following Schön’s theory of reflection-in-action (1983), students develop self-understanding through iterative cycles of hands-on media experimentation followed by written reflection and collective debrief. Through these cycles, students reflect not only on discrete media-making practices, but on how documents and specific documentary approaches can affect the interpretation of an entire body of work. In this way, the Documentation for Designers curriculum also draws on theories of design hermeneutics — namely in the way that a whole is understood through its parts, while those parts are simultaneously understood in the context of the whole (Gadamer et al., 2004; Snodgrass & Coyne, 1996). In using media to make sense of themselves through their work (and sense of their work through themselves) students continually reflect upon how seemingly minute documentation strategies have the power to produce wildly divergent design narratives.
Documentation for Designers asked students to follow weekly assignments in the form of “recipes.” Each recipe provided step-by-step instructions to create a unique media document as well as a short written reflection.
Each recipe focused on a different documentation medium (or combination of media) and was designed to ease students into unfamiliar ways of capturing and reflecting on their work. By allowing students to concentrate on gathering materials and following a sequence of clearly-defined steps rather than rushing to a desired outcome, the recipe format emphasized process over product, and even integrated mindfulness cues throughout each procedure (take a breath; take a break and come back...). In this way, class recipes offered students blueprints for embodying design practice at a slower, more contemplative pace better suited to reflexive learning.
data visualization
photography
videography
audio journalling
writing + analysis
design research
collage
storytelling
Documentation for Designers’ recipes progressively built on one another in terms of both skills and generated media. Assignments later in the course drew on media and skills developed earlier in the course. As a result, all course media (as well as student assignments brought in from other courses) could be continually reevaluated and recontextualized.
For example, students’ final collages and stories in recipes seven and eight incorporated media gathered from earlier photography, video, and audio assignments. They also utilized students’ writing and synthesis skills cultivated throughout the quarter.
Hand-drawn diagram of how skills and materials were transferred between the eight multimedia recipes in Documentation for Designers — later recipes utilized media and practices from earlier in the term.
At the 2021 UC Davis Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference, two students (Amber Irfan and Sofia Zavalza) and I presented the pedagogical framework for the Documentation for Designers course. Our interactive poster had three major components: