‘Wait, wait, Dan, your turn’: Authority and Assessment in the Design Critique

This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it considers how the assessment of students' design work is delivered and who delivers it. Through using conversation analysis to look in close-up detail at a number of short segments of tutor-student interaction, we consider how a tutor performs assessment himself and also coaches other students to assess, in ways that may significantly contribute to students' understanding of what assessment is and how it is to occur. We find that, although the data was not collected with attention to the gender of the participants, the way in which the participants perform the reviews does indicate that participant gender had some impact upon the interaction. Creating opportunities for students and instructors to reflect upon evaluation, and how it is performed, may better equip participants in design education to recognize, debate, and also change some of the discourses in which design practice is embedded and performed.