Educating citizen designers in South Africa

Educating Citizen Designers in South Africa is the first book of its kind to appear in post-apartheid South Africa and it is therefore both overdue and extremely welcome. The book aims at sharing critical citizenship design teaching and learning pedagogies by including contributions from a range of design educators, and one student, who work in different design disciplines, such as architecture, graphic and product design. Critical citizenship education is explicated in relation to a range of theories and new and existing models. Numerous contemporary case studies and examples of design projects from a range of South African Higher Education Institutions are included. As such, a variety of perspectives emerge, including the consensual, where the aim of critical citizenship education is viewed as promoting social justice, shared values and critical thinking, to the conflicting – where critiques are levelled against conceptions of critical citizenship education. Contentious, contesting and contradictory views are inevitable and necessary given the South African context as it is only in open debate that the one point of agreement among the authors, the need for social change, can be worked towards. Prof Deirdre Pretorius,Univeristy of Johannesburg.