Visible Design

Abstract

The presence of digital artefacts in the surrounding world holds both a structured and a structuring role that has an impact on the rationales with which we act and organize our behaviour and knowledge. The process that leads towards a major subject’s agentivity and towards a primary role of the design, useful to act in a complex context, is supported by the digital technologies. The ME takes us to new operative and cognitive modalities and promotes a critical attitude.

Also at school the design process plays a central role since the complexity of contexts, their fragmentation and the lack of “meta narrative/grand narrative” (Lyotard, 1987) require that the teacher build situated rationales. The digital technologies can support the design process. Thanks to the digitalization the design’s artefact becomes a fluid object that comes from the design, but that can be, then, used in the classroom as a mediator and make students visualize the path. It supports the teacher and the students in their actions and it is completed in the documentation.

The design’s artefact replaces the teacher in some routines, that is, the activity of the teacher to frame the class, to connect the present with the past and future activities, to build a  net of meaning that provides a comprehensive vision of the path.   Those aspects affect the students’ orientation, their motivation, but the presence of the artefact in classroom supports also the teacher by also providing self-confidence. This is the proposal the article aims at deepening.