FIND THE GAP: AN APPROACH FOR VISUALIZING AND ANALYSING DESIGN COMPETENCIES IN A UNIVERSITY WITH INTERDISCIPLINARY CURRICULUM

Abstract

Design education needs to be continually investigated and improved to stay relevant. The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is a leading university focused on all elements of technology-based design. The overarching motivation of our research is to enhance design education curriculum at SUTD. Our research objectives are (1) to understand how design competencies are implemented in SUTD's curriculum and courses (2) to identify gaps in teaching of design competencies at SUTD. We analyse competencies in 28 design courses at SUTD. We develop the visualization and analysis of 12 skills grouped under two abilities from the Design competency assessment framework. Our main contributions are: (1) We present an approach to map the design competencies that are taught across design courses at a university with an interdisciplinary curriculum, (2) We present an approach for mapping design competency progression based on ITAE (Introduced, Taught, Assessed, Expected) categorization, (3) Based on the above, we provide preliminary findings on two skill gaps in the curriculum, substantiated with insights from interviews with course coordinators.