Emergence and amelioration of students' creativity through practice based learning in relation to design education

Abstract

‘Practice-based education (PBE) offers the students an invaluable experience to gain knowledge and improve their skills towards diverse fields which prove the realities in the social and physical context.’ (Clifford, Macy, Albi, Bricker & Rahn, 2005). This method becomes more significant when it comes to Design education in university teaching. To provide an effective Practice-based education, university education system undergoes a complex and time-intensive process. The main objective of this research is to explore the possibility and suitability of practice based educational system in nurturing the students to build up a design rational and to find out the essential factors to be considered while at teaching and designing projects. This was experimented through a design project carried out for the Level I students of Department of Integrated Design. The study describes how student capabilities were gradually developed in forming a design rational by using the Human body as a design context. Here the form of education becomes more unique and significant, that their approaches became successful more than to the expected level. It was through practice and experience that the students achieve expected targets in the design project. The final outcome of the project is a result of different activities followed with workshops and immense experiments. A solitary observation was followed throughout the project as to understand how beneficial is practice based education in improving student skills and how the projects must be designed setting out certain goals and objectives with special reference to Design education. The results of the research analysis concluded that practice or activity based learning system becomes more effective for design education, when students’ physiological and psychological abilities are evaluated and gradually expanded by offering them the understanding about the context, method of integration, theoretical knowledge while developing an own sense for design.