The dramatization of practice in design education: (Un)learning by doing through participant observation

Although ‘learning by doing’ is nowadays a standard practice in design education, there is not much reflexivity about what designers actually do with a ‘learning by doing’ approach. Based on my ethnographic research in a design school in Milan, I examine designers’ performance of practical learning by looking at their use of participant observation, a method borrowed from social sciences and applied to an early stage of the students’ design research projects. I detail how, in the exercises with participant observation, ‘practice’ emerges as an aesthetic effect that is performed to simulate the openness of the research, a process I refer to as a ‘dramatization of practice’.