Education guide 'Eindhoven designs' - Technische Universiteit ...

Eindhoven designs / volume two 55
Self-Directed and
Continuous Learning
Take responsibility for and give direction
to your own personal development,
based on a continuous process of
self-reflection and out of curiosity for
future developments in technology and
society.
Developments in society are characterised by
an enormous increase in available knowledge
and information, which makes it impossible
for graduates to have a complete command
of their academic discipline. There is just too
much to know and to learn, and what you know
today may well be out of date in a number
of years. Industrial Design as an academic
discipline, too, is susceptible to changes.
Once students have become professional
designers, they will be challenged to create
an environment that adapts to and supports
the lives of individual people. Rather than
acquiring a particular body of knowledge, this
requires their ability to acquire, select and
use the knowledge, skills and attitudes that
they need for effective behaviour in a specific
context.
This, in turn, requires an attitude of openness:
not only to developments in their profession
and in society, but also towards the student’s
own performance and learning needs in
professional situations. Students graduate
once but they will never stop learning. The
ability to learn is at the core of becoming
a life-long learner. Students should get an
understanding of what learning is as an
activity, discover what their preferred learning
style and learning strategy is, learn how to
play with various styles and strategies, and
develop the skills they need to design their
own learning process. This understanding
should be grounded in theoretical as well as
experiential knowledge.
In a competency-centred programme such as ID
students need to direct and manage their own
competency development, learning process
and learning activities: what do they want or
need to learn, and what does it take to achieve
it? This requires the ability to orientate oneself
on what there is to learn, to set one’s own
learning goals, to choose suitable learning
activities (and sometimes create their own),
to plan, execute and monitor these activities,
to analyse one’s learning outcomes in terms
of competency development and to evaluate
if one has achieved the goals one sets. In the
end students should also be able to selfassess
their competency development and
growth as a designer. Needless to say, the selfmanagement
aspect of this competency only
works if they take full responsibility for their
own learning process.
Learning – and designing – is a process of trial
and error. From making mistakes, in particular,
they can learn about themselves and about
designing. But this takes the courage and the
ability to look more closely at themselves,
their learning process and learning outcomes.
What knowledge and skills have they actually