We Need to Talk About Learning Design. A Proposal for Critical Conversation

Conversations about how design learning moves toward its preferable future are critical. This paper discusses a hybrid area of investigation across Futures studies and Design Research that informs thinking toward a design education imaginary, as part of a larger body of work addressing pedagogical innovation. It sets out discursive approaches for connecting knowledge, and investigates the role that narrative might play in enabling that future to be imagined, visualised and enacted. The paper introduces a process — a tool, currently in early phase testing — through which discursive, community knowledge might be collected for application within existing systems and processes. The paper proposes critical conversation as a form of making, as a device for creating the future story in, and of, design learning, pointing toward a new chapter for design education where it might expand to truly make sense of the world around learning.