What students say about their work and what it says about their work. Toward the development of rhetorical practice in the educational design studio

The knowledge and skill required by graphic designers is expanding from traditional views that value craft and technical expertise to those reliant on reflective design thinking. This marks a re-definition of design as a social practice more concerned with the facilitation of interaction(s) and that draws on design criticism and principles of rhetoric. Consequently, design practitioners must apply skills that place more emphasis on the impact or outcome of design and where people, and how they respond as part of a communication system, are the priority. However, despite this indication that rhetoric is vital to shifting design thinking and practice, our understanding of the skills related to its application and how they are developed is relatively limited. In this exploratory study we gauge the current state of design education in an Australian university to determine whether and to what extent students reflect critically on the effectiveness of their work.