Assessing design activity: issues and actions

A major challenge in design education, particularly in higher education, is to not only achieve excellent design skills in students, but also to demonstrate quality of educational outcomes to an increasingly wide range of stakeholders. Students, graduates, employers, clients and the general community have increasingly legitimate stakes in what constitutes quality in educational outcomes. The high standing of a design programme and its graduates no longer depend only on the quality of teaching and professional accreditation: they increasingly depend on satisfying the various expectations of a wide range of stakeholders across the community [Institution of Engineers, 1996]. This paper outlines an extensive international collaborative research and development programme that set out to find a single framework that would integrate assessment [of students], evaluation [of teachingl, accreditation and accountability criteria into a single framework that would allow quality of design education and its outcomes to be convincingly demonstrated to all stakeholders.