Background Information
Design education increasingly takes place across physical and digital domains. In the course Design and Sensorial Form, students learn how to design experiences that engage the senses through hands on exploration, analysis, and iterative making. Traditionally, this work has focused mainly on physical prototypes, offering rich tactile and embodied insights but limited opportunities to explore digital contexts and scaling.
The course already introduces the idea of moving between physical designs and virtual representations by recreating physical designs as digital twins. However, this process currently places a heavy technical burden on students and staff. Complex software tools demand extensive instruction time, reducing opportunities for meaningful reflection, experimentation, and dialogue between physical and virtual explorations. As a result, the intended learning process of iterating between making and reflecting is disrupted.
A key challenge lies in enabling what the design discipline describes as material talkback. This refers to the ideas that emerge through interaction with materials (including exploration, sketching, modelmaking, etc.) during the design process. It takes sensitivity and skill to accomplish this within and between physical design materials but it is even more challenging to do this in the virtual realm. This limits the students’ ability to develop embodied and contextual design competence.
This pilot responds to these challenges by redesigning the course offer. By shifting technical instruction outside the classroom and creating shared frameworks, templates, and examples, the project aims to better connect physical and virtual design work while increasing scalability and educational depth.
Aim of the project
The aim of this project is to strengthen students’ ability to design across physical and virtual domains by facilitating meaningful interaction between both. The project seeks to enable material talkback not only within each medium, but also across them, allowing ideas to emerge through transformation rather than representation.
To achieve this,. instructional content for creating digital twins and working in virtual environments will be provided through videos, tutorials, and prepared project templates. This flipped the classroom approach reduces the need for in class technical instruction and frees time for coaching, reflection, and feedback.
The project also aims to develop a shared language for physical and digital material literacy. Through peer analysis, curated examples, and guided discussion, students learn to recognize and articulate how insights gained in one medium inform exploration in another. This supports self directed learning and reflective design practice.
In addition, the project aims to increase course capacity without compromising quality. By making digital tools more accessible and instruction more scalable, more students can engage deeply with both physical making and virtual contextualization.
At a broader level, the project aims to prepare students for contemporary design practice, where physical and digital experiences are increasingly intertwined in meaningful and responsible ways.
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