Selling your design: Oral communication pedagogy in design education

Abstract

Good design skills are the main focus of assessment practices in design education and are evaluated primarily by drawings and models. In some settings, design studio pedagogy tends to reflect only these content-oriented assessment priorities, with minimal attention paid to the development of oral communication skills. Yet, in many professional contexts, architects need both sets of skills: design competence and the ability to articulate designs for an audience. This paper explores two approaches to oral communication pedagogy in design education - a public speaking approach and a genre-based linguistic approach - and then applies one particular linguistic approach to novice design studio pre..