Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my experiences as a senior lecturer and teaching assistant for the past three years, I have accumulated quite an amount of experience and feel confident to conquer the challenges and opportunities from the academic area, especially in the industrial design field. As the senior lecturer in the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University, my areas of teaching specialization include basic design I/II, industrial design studio, as well as 3D modeling. From 2013 to 2015, as a graduate teaching assistant in Auburn University, I participated in several classes such as anthropometry, photography, portfolio, also in 3D design studio as a co-instructor.

Considering these previous experiences, I recognized that besides the training of design skills and process, the role of the design educator is to stimulate students’ curiosity, to inspire them to solve problems in different ways, as well as to help them involve in design thinking at their earlier

Building an active learning and open environment is vital for studio or lab-based courses. Furthermore, active learning and self-exploration learning are crucial pedagogies to encourage a student’s curiosity. Thus, my course atmosphere is always dynamic and evolving. In the basic design I course, different learning approaches are incorporated such as running teamwork workshops, encouraging peer reviews, and exploring design activities to help students involved in the subject quickly. For instance, underneath the learning topic of reframing and abstract, a one-hour workshop is run as an introduction session to the whole class. Students are encouraged to find target objects, which has been well defined and normative, (such as umbrella, key, etc.) around their classroom. Then they are assigned to consider alternative operations for those chosen objects, perhaps in another context. In order to demonstrate the new use of the object, each team presents a 30-second video in the whole class. The aligned following assignment “reframing” is an extension and continued studying of the same topic. The whole class use flashlight, oven mitt, and cellphone to analyze and apply how to abstract a current context and object to its fundamental properties. Finally, the abstraction process enables students to design a response to the situation the object is addressing. On the “process-based teaching” studios (Lundmark, 1998), constructivism emphasizes constructing and building learner’s knowledge systems based on the interactions between the old and new thoughts and experiences( Degn & Ridder, 2015), which could be described as an open studio with fewer constraints and assets defined by the instructor. The following case would further clarify this viewpoint. Second-year ID students are challenged to face a kitchen scenario focusing on defining their topics and addressing the existing problems in the kitchen. Through the initial research, benchmarking, iterate, and feedback offered from in-class and extra-curricular communications, students were able to narrow down their concepts based on the insights they gained. From this step, a newly generated approaches have been built to assist for their final design solutions. Finally, each student created their unique ideas such as field kitchen organizer, iceless cooler, and crock-pot for elderly. As a result, this open project accelerated the process of making the student “an active player in the pedagogical context” (Lundmark, 1998), thus built a diversity and active-learning atmosphere for the whole class.

Offer industry practice insight to students. Based on my working experience in the plastic design industry, I recognize that incorporation of real industry and manufacturing would make students more prepared and thus, providing a smooth transition for their future career. This pedagogy applies for both studio course and lecture course. For my studio trophy project, design evaluation and feedback mechanism are involved by inviting alumni from the real industry, faculties from other disciplinarians, and students from other grades. Students presented their design solutions and accepted different viewpoints from both internal and external reviews. As for the 3D modeling course, I am planning to integrate draft analysis, component structure, and 3D printing settings in current curriculum, assigning dental floss project for students to get familiar with these mechanical techniques. Moreover, design activities (such as organizing field trips in the production line and trade shows, etc.) are also taken into consideration. All of the above teaching explorations will contribute to students to adapt themselves to the future work after graduation.

Different learning methods should be explored and adjusted according to different students’ talents. Commonly, different students have different strengths. As an educator, one of the roles is to respect diverse talents and encourage students to recognize their strengths and weakness through learning, and then adapt themselves to different outcomes. As the teaching assistant in the second-year studio, I helped students to use various methods to develop their concepts. For example, one of the students complained that her clock design lacked details. Based on my observation, she needs to improve her hand drawing skills. Thus, I suggested that she could start with orthographic drawing, instead of hand drawing. Through different views, she could create more transition details between different components easily. As a result, she added a transition surface between the dial plate and body plate. In the same project, for students who have a talent on hand craftsmanship, I encourage them to build a prototype to explore new concepts. Under my guidance, two of the students created a dynamic dial plate rather than a conventional pointer in the clock project. “Exploded view” is another technique I introduced to that class which focuses on students who are highly skilled in sketch. Unexpected problems would be revealed through the exploded view for the kitchenware projects. To sum up, helping students explore different learning methods and recognize their own strength and weakness is essential for instructors.

Involving interdisciplinary corporation in the curriculum. Today’s designers are required to consider more complex systems and transdisciplinary issues than independent events or isolated topics. According to the “American Institute of Graphic Arts” (AIGA) states, problems are more situated and related within larger systems (AIGA, 2017). Based on these challenges in the industry, design education should also align with this constant evolution, to help students involved in large scaled topics and projects. After recognizing this, I decided to bring E-portfolio (which is regarded as personal website) into senior-year portfolio, considering the E-portfolio carries multidisciplinary topics, which also has strong ties to copyright, network security, and marketing. To cultivate students’ transdisciplinary thinking of privacy concerns, publication, and marketing tips, I created a series of design guidelines in the syllabus to deepen their understanding of E-portfolio. After the portfolio assignment, feedback and mock-up interviews were involved in the class discussion, to enable them actively engaged in and outside the class. As a result, E-portfolio received positive feedback from the graduating students and later has become a routine of this course. McDermott pointed out that interdisciplinary collaboration enable students apply their own disciplines while requiring them to bring their disciplinary expertise together (McDermott, Boradkar & Zunjarward, 2014). Another case is a three-week “Board Game” project, which took place for first-year undergraduate students from all design disciplines (architecture, interior, graphic design, and game art). Seventy-five students were divided into twenty-five teams with three students each team. Each team could select their own game type and target audience, and then, they iterated, prototyped, and play tested to determine the effectiveness of the game. Once defining their own game constraints, students are able to apply their own toolbox and techniques to contribute to their team. For example, architecture students apply their spatial principles, 3D modeling, and 3D printing techniques to the team. Game art students carry out their playing test mechanism to modify and optimize the game rules. Graphic design students work on improving the visual quality of the game. After completion of this cross-function teamwork, students recognized that other disciplines and areas of knowledge could improve the working efficiency and broad their eyes.

Teaching and research are indirectly beneficial for both instructors and students. It is no doubt that teaching is a quite rewarding process. Commonly, ideas and thoughts from students usually inspired the instructors by breaking instructor’s conventional perceptions through teaching process, especially in design field. Thus, through the teaching process, students will help the instructors to modify and revise the curriculum content. Apart from the teaching, research is also tremendously benefit for both instructors and students as well. From Healey’s point of view, when students are involved in inquiry-based learning, they are likely to gain most benefit from depth of learning and understanding. (Healey, 2005). My research interests involve aesthetic consciousness and cognition, aesthetic recognition improvement, as well as experience with the design of space and object. I am planning to corporate my research interests of aesthetic awareness with curriculum development and design exploration activities. Next semester, some cognition experiments and related projects will incorporate with “Basic Design II” course, to enable students gain a depth understanding of the aesthetic meaning. Two years ago, more than ten of my previous students participated in my thesis research (face-to-face interviews). Their thoughts of future application on how to design a survey inspired me to develop new ideas on my research. With great passion and enthusiasm in teaching, I hope that I could contribute as much as I could as an educator.

ESU ART 154 3D Design Students Present t