Revisiting the Intersections of Art and Design in Contemporary Design Education: A Systematic Literature Review (2010–2025)

Art and design education have become increasingly interconnected within contemporary higher education, particularly as institutions emphasise creativity, critical thinking, and digital innovation as core learning objectives. Despite this convergence, the conceptual, pedagogical, and epistemological boundaries between art and design remain inconsistently articulated and often contested in educational scholarship. This systematic literature review examines 72 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2010 and 2025 that explicitly discuss both “art” and “design” in educational contexts, with a particular focus on pedagogical practices relevant to design and technologies education. The review identifies four interrelated thematic clusters: pedagogical integration, technological mediation, curriculum and assessment reform, and creativity as a shared learning outcome. Across the literature, art is commonly associated with expression, aesthetics, reflection, and affective engagement, while design is typically framed around purpose, problem-solving, systems thinking, and process. However, the findings demonstrate a clear shift towards understanding art and design as interdependent forms of knowledge-making, increasingly taught through studio-based, experiential, and technology-enhanced pedagogies that foreground reflection, critique, and material engagement. Rather than collapsing disciplinary distinctions, contemporary scholarship supports an epistemologically unified continuum in which artistic and design practices are productively reconfigured to support creative literacy, reflective judgment, and socially responsive making. The review further reveals a strong Western and industrial bias in existing research, with limited representation of African and Global South perspectives, despite the presence of indigenous craft and material cultures that already integrate art–design epistemologies. The study concludes by underscoring the need for more situated, practice-based, and culturally responsive research to advance a pluralistic global discourse on art–design pedagogy, particularly within underrepresented educational contexts.