All together and at once the practice: towards a pedagogy of implication for Australian industrial design

Concerning modes of pedagogy, this research investigates the incidence of complex design studio projects that manifest a ‘program’ that contains Sociotranseunt Practice, a theory towards a “pedagogy of implication”. A theorising through, and for the teaching of industrial design, it provides an account of how concerns for a changing disciplinary condition can be approached pedagogically: where design and education are all together and at once the practice.<br><br>Industrial design in the contemporary Australian context confronts major change. Changing sociotechnical practices produce complex problems in the ways people live with designed things and systems. Issues of sustainability, and the agency of design in a de-industrializing local economy, are transfiguring normative meanings and modes of practice. The capacity for industrial design practice to mediate the implications of delivering change to social and technical practices is necessarily a problem of pedagogy.<br><br>Undertaken in my capacity as a practitioner researcher, the research provides an account of industrial design educational practice in the contemporary Australian context. The research forms as a narrative of changing disciplinary and educational drivers and ideals as experienced in teaching, and explicated through reflections on practice. It confronts the collision of current disciplinary concerns with historical disciplinary tendencies to articulate a process of (and for) pedagogy: to activate in teaching, to problematize, and reflect on a hybridised practice of designing as education, and education for and within design.<br><br>The research explores how pedagogic practices might be theorised in order to activate opportunities for the construction of new meanings of design practice to operate in within changing disciplinary conditions. Abstractions of the researchers pedagogic approaches, in the form of diagrammatic models and tools, constitute the key element of the research; acts of design that move from the mind, out through practice and to the proposition of Sociotranseunt Practice. It builds a theoretical proposition for industrial design practice-pedagogy, and new strategies to enable through design: the mediation of social and technical practices towards sustainability and critical citizenry; and, the transformation of industrial design towards a critical practice that attends to the implications of its own practices.<br><br>A pedagogic and design practice theory, Sociotranseunt Practice repositions the industrial designer to operate through a socially activated and transitive practice, where the designer is a critical mediatory agent within socially defined contexts of concern, and the design of new things and systems cross into and transform the manifested implications of sociotechnical practices. Redrawing the contexts of work for industrial design, Sociotranseunt Practice alters the very doing of design. Problem solving gets recast as an activity of implication mediation, and design activity is rendered a transformative and interloping actor, thereby elevating, in a context of application, new responsibilities for design. The act of designing becomes a ‘thing-ing’ and a ‘system-ing’, and the designer is visibly, and inextricably implicated in the mediation of socio-technical practices.