Design Domain: Created Space, Creative Space

In this article, I describe and explore Design Domain, a large‐cohort course for which I am academic coordinator and which is enacted across six design programmes at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA). I unpack Design Domain’s context and intentionality as a ‘created space’, where student learners are exposed to different ways of thinking, making and doing, with an emphasis on working within discipline but pushing boundaries beyond the discipline. Next, I evaluate Design Domain as a ‘creative space’, unpacking its lineaments and evaluating its positives and challenges. Then, I set out initial reflections on the taxonomy of disciplinarities, arguing that these can be usefully reappraised when applied to a pedagogical framework like Design Domain, which blends predominantly individual learning with particular and specific points of collective commonality of purpose and action. Finally, I describe how I will go onto develop my understanding via an action research informed evaluation of a recent Design Domain project in Communication Design, where students of graphic design, photography and illustration worked together. I frame the type of critical questions I might ask of staff and student respondents in an action research informed evaluation study, and I offer a preliminary conclusion: that it is more appropriate to focus on ways of thinking than prescribing ways of doing, and that this might bring practice and process into a more adaptive theoretical framework.