This chapter will examine the role of a new Dual Award degree in its effect on the positive enhancement of East Asian design students entering the global creative industrial markets. Through a collaborative partnership between UK's...
moreThis chapter will examine the role of a new Dual Award degree in its effect on the positive enhancement of East Asian design students entering the global creative industrial markets. Through a collaborative partnership between UK's Northumbria University and Indonesia's BINUS International University in Jakarta, this Dual Award was launched in 2014 with the aim of providing Indonesian students a curriculum to enhance their ability to develop into globally focused design graduates. Students from BINUS' Graphic Design, Fashion Design and Fashion Management degrees take two extra Northumbrian modules alongside their own final year work. An Indonesian bachelor degree lasts four years, and the two Dual Award modules are run during non-core time. These two modules provide the students with a synthesis between East and West design. Two Northumbria academic design lecturers travel to Jakarta three times a year to work on campus with the Indonesians at BINUS-Northumbria School of Design in Jakarta. After which, throughout the academic year, there is continued Northumbria teaching support using video conferencing and digital submissions to help the students to successfully complete their modular work. While the visiting Northumbria lecturers are on campus, they also engage with each degree's first three years by setting each year group a design project based on aspects of Indonesian cultural identity. These projects help to prepare the students for fourth year study on the Dual Award by developing their collaborative practice. The projects build year on year to nurture the students' growing confidence in their abilities, prepping them to be ready to develop their innate talents into globally focused solutions, while academically informing and supporting the development and enhancement of the two Dual Award modules. In their fourth year on the Dual Award, the students from the Graphic Design, Fashion Design and Fashion Management degrees consider how to build on their own cultural wealth as Indonesian designers, to provide the creative industrial markets of contemporary design and visual communication with fresh creative perspectives. The lessons learnt from what the students consider as culturally important to them first as Indonesian designers, is then filtered through their own sense of aesthetic application in the designed artefacts they create. This chapter's case study will demonstrate how this special international learning environment creates a synergy between East and West creative industries. At the heart of the integrated learning in the curriculum delivery is a Pragmatism that encourages emergence of understanding through designing. This pedagogy facilitates the tailoring of each Indonesian student's understanding of what a global designer can be, springing from within their own cultural identity and what they, as graduates, can offer future employers and clients as new graduates. Moholy-Nagy, inspired by the pedagogical theories of John Dewey, pioneered this pragmatic model of understanding through doing in Chicago's New Bauhaus School. From this historical and philosophical pedagogical position on design education, this chapter's case study will conclude on the lessons learnt from how the Dual Award has impacted on developing globally focused but pragmatic design graduates.