Surface, deep, implicit. Basic design as a signature pedagogy in design education

Borrowing the concept of signature pedagogy from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the present article transposes it to the domain of design studies, with the aim of questioning if, and how, the educational model of basic design could be considered as such. The first part of this paper deepens the notion of signature pedagogy, a conceptual framework codified within the SoTL in order to detect the fundamental criteria that organise knowledge into the multiplicity of its disciplinary and professional sectors. The second part of this paper shifts the attention towards the international landscape of design studies, observing how, in the recent years, a first body of studies and research acknowledging the concept of signature pedagogy from a disciplinary point of view has gradually been deposited. Finally, the third part of this study focuses on basic design, tracing its cultural origins and outlining a possible reading of such an educational model understood as a signature pedagogy, argued according to the three structures — surface, deep, and implicit — from which each signature pedagogy derives its own backbone.