Educating a Socially Responsible Designer

Between user and environment, the main responsibility of a designer is to conceive user as part of design understanding. Design education is one of the important stages to provide required bottom-up change in prevalent design perspectives by equipping student with necessary skills and tools towards a socially responsible designer. Addressing this issue, the chapter aims to provide a framework to contribute education of socially responsible designer. Focusing on Donald Schön's notion of “on-the-spot inquiry,” a framework for the organization of user learning in design studio is discussed to provide design students a way to understand real user with its complex dimensions and lead them to define their design problem with this user-informed perspective. The critical tools of this approach are underlined as real user-student interaction, on-the-spot user inquiry, and user case in design studio. This framework is exemplified with a user case involving a design studio experience.