Taxonomy of Educational Objectives for ‘General’ Design Discipline

Design educators working in a private University in India experience a peculiar problem of writing course outcomes of every design course using the Bloom’s Taxonomy action verbs. It is believed, with subjective reasoning, that there is a mismatch between Bloom’s taxonomy and learning outcomes of design. The Bloom’s taxonomy is specifically designed to deal with ‘Cognitive’ learning outcomes. However, design is a discipline based on ‘affective’ or ‘feeling’ and ‘value’ aspects of learning. David Krathwohl, who was the co-author of Bloom’s taxonomy, had introduced another taxonomy based on ‘affective’ aspects of learning known as Taxonomy of the Affective domain, but that taxonomy has not gained much popularity in Higher education programs because of difficulties in large scale implementation. This paper is an attempt to introduce a new taxonomy of educational objectives for a generalised Design discipline that is not compartmentalised into specialisations such as Product design, Communication design, Interaction Design, Interior Design, etc. based on synthesis of taxonomy of affective domain introduced by David Krathwohl, evolutionary developments in ‘theory of Value’ and the Design Thinking process. Design is probably the only formal education discipline that lacks a commonly shared taxonomy of educational objectives. Maybe, there is no possibility or usefulness of a commonly shared taxonomy of Design discipline. Even if it is ultimately true, we still need sound arguments for rejecting Bloom’s taxonomy to be imposed on Design Educators for defining their educational objectives.