A postgraduate design learning experience: understanding the effects of community, cultural and contextual environment

This paper describes on going research that investigates how learning (students and tutors) takes place in a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural postgraduate design programme in the UK. The research maps and makes explicit the effects of community, cultural and contextual environment on learning. Initial findings have identified that learning is taking place within communities of practice and further research is used to explore reasons for its emergence. The authors evaluate and discuss the effects of learning in a post disciplinary and multi-cultural environment, and its value to current design postgraduate pedagogy. A social model of learning and communities of practice is evident in the design programme studied and preliminary findings indicates that this model is particularly relevant model to adopt in the current post-disciplinary era.