Design as a learning cycle: a conversational experience

This paper examines Diana Laurillard's Conversational Framework as a method for facilitating learning in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in design. The paper focuses on the Framework's underpinning notion of academic knowledge as fundamentally second-order, and uses the case of a design course set in a commercialised, experiential learning environment to explore the implications of this in constraining broader application. By suggesting a modification to the Conversational Framework to accommodate experiential learning in a design studio setting, this paper suggests that it is more widely applicable than previously assumed. It further argues that, as an integrative cyclical process, a conversational framework does not necessarily rely on the privileging of abstract knowledge and the exclusion of experiential learning processes.