March 25, 2015
Interior architecture & product design professor wins top honor at design conference
Research by an associate professor of interior architecture & product development at Kansas State University's College of Architecture, Planning & Design, or APDesign, has earned a top honor at the recent Interior Design Educations Council's annual North American conference.
Ryadi Adityavarman earned the council's 2015 Award Excellence for best poster presentation with "Teaching Freehand Analytical Drawing: Strategy and Pedagogy based on Polanyian Philosophy of Knowledge for Millennia Design Students." The annual conference was March 10-14 in Fort Worth, Texas.
Adityavarman's study is based on the idea of freehand drawing as an integral part for creativity development by using the philosophy of Michael Poland as its theoretical framework. From his years of teaching, Adityavarman noticed that most students have difficulty learning freehand drawing partly because of fear toward ambiguity and lack of bodily sensibility.
"The very act of freehand drawing demands willingness to deal with ambiguity through proper flexibility and fluency of mind-eye-hand coordination," he said. "Based on the learning principle from Polanyi philosophy, the repetitive bodily training through drawing will help to improve a higher level of mental and cognitive ability on dealing with essential nature of ambiguity in the design process."
Tim de Noble, professor and dean of APDesign said, "I greatly appreciate Professor Adityavarman's focus on developing freehand drawing, an important underpinning of all we do as designers. To paraphrase design professor Nigel Cross, "Freehand sketching is an intelligence amplifier."