sana Cámara Leret: “In design schools, intuition is often accepted as the single starting point for creation.” In order to help students to get acquainted with a more analytical and reflective approach several Design Research Spaces challenged them to do extensive ethnographic research, to get in touch with the people for whom they were designing. In the Design Research Space on empathy, Research Associate Alessia Cadamuro and tutor Jacqueline Cove found out that students were struggling to set up conversations with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and their relatives. By training the students to follow patients in their daily routines, record their experiences and simply listen to their stories, the students became more familiar with this approach and came to understand that these stories are a result in themselves. That provided them with essential information for their designs. The Design Research Spaces also offered an important introduction to new roles designers could take on. Research Associate Jonathan Wray did research on new services for KLM inflight services and used storytelling and theatrical techniques as a methodology. Based on the interviews and workshops he initiated with passengers and cabin crew, he unpacked detailed stories and experiences of long haul flight passengers. In his Design Research Space, together with tutor Piet Hein Clijssen, he encouraged students to explore these experiences in theatrical settings as a way to challenge their own preconceptions regarding long haul travel experiences. These confrontations generated very rich reflections that formed the basis for newly designed interventions. This taught us that theatre techniques can be very valuable in design education – as a way to understand situations and people, but also to generate new ideas.
Educational connections with industry
Furthermore, The Design Research Spaces created a welcome opportunity to make new connections between DAE and industry. DAE students and departments regularly work with industrial ‘clients’ through the Friendship programme of DAE, but knowledge creation is seldom an aim of these partnerships. In the Design Research Spaces industry partners were always easy to involve because they were already part of the project of the Research Associate. As a result they were also interested in both new concepts and new knowledge about how to develop such concepts that could influence how they worked themselves. Research Associate Karianne Rygh set up a Design Research
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