Signature pedagogies: exploring how industrial designers acquire their professional culture and identity

Abstract

This paper explores the conditions in which Industrial Design (ID) students acquire the identity and culture associated with their profession. For this purpose, the author uses—as a framework—the concept of signature pedagogies in order to identify those conditions and explore how these mold the identity of future industrial designers. Shulman (2005) defines signature pedagogies as the particular forms of teaching and learning that preserve and transmit the culture of a profession. These pedagogies are used to instruct future practitioners in how to think, perform, and act with integrity according to the canons of their profession, and are defined by three structures: surface structure—the observable actions of teaching, deep structure—assumptions about how to best transfer knowledge and skills, and implicit structure—beliefs, attitudes, values, and dispositions held by faculty. In this paper, these structures are used to describe and analyze ID education, aiming to explain identity development in their future practitioners. The paper concludes that the interplay between these structures are partially responsible for molding the identity of the future industrial designers, but raises questions about how rigid or fluid this identity is to tackle the challenges of an uncertain and ever-changing world.