Creative critique in visual communication: Effective feedback in design projects through voice-centred studio-based communication and online delivery

Creative review and critique in visual communication education is critical to learning and creative design outcomes. If we accept that creative outcomes are vital to design learning, and critique is critical to learning through design, then it is imperative that teachers investigate their practice of giving feedback on student artefacts, especially in the design context and the rapidly evolving virtual and online environment of contemporary education. This imperative is even greater if we accept that assessing creativity, and critique of design artefacts, is highly contestable and an emotionally charged event. How does the design teacher construct creative knowledge for the student designer? How can individual teachers analyse and improve their critique on student learning products and incorporate the improvements into their everyday teaching practice? Oral communication plays an important scaffolding role in developing socially-held and shared knowledge of creativity and the design artefact. This paper reports an action-orientated process in which final year graphic design students, a design lecturer and her colleagues collaborated to develop, trial and revise, a checklist for giving constructive verbal critique, both online and face-to-face, in a design project-based context. This paper builds upon – and updates – our initial research presented at ACUADS 2004, ‘Critiquing critique: Investigating effective verbal feedback in graphic design critiques’