Tese desenvolvida no âmbito do doutoramento em Design, apresentada ao IADE-UE, realizada sob orientação de Maria Emília Capucho Duarte e de Diana da Silva Dias

The Higher Education (HE) system faces the challenges of providing a holistic education to the future designers, enabling them the capacity to approach the increasingly complex socio-technic problems. The challenge seems aggravated by the accelerated digitalization of education. However, digital technological mediums, such as Virtual Reality (VR), offers unique effective contributions to many educational settings. VR enables real-time and intuitive interactions, in synthetic 3D worlds, where artificial experiences tend to produce the same effect as the real ones, depending on the immersive capacity of the VR system. Immersive VR (iVR) is expected to become more important and prominent, opening more possibilities for VR to expand its potential to influence and redefine culture. The problem then arises of how digital technology will impact the teaching in design, and particularly, the teaching-learning of Basic Design, in all its holistic dimension. The problem then arises of how digital technology will impact the teaching in design, and particularly, the teaching-learning of Basic Design, in all its holistic dimension. In this sense, our study focuses the questions: In the context of the development of Basic Design (BD) skills (i.e., the teaching-learning of the design fundamentals), can, and how can iVR-based tools contribute to refill HE system its holistic nature and capacitate designers to address the world’s complex socio technical problems? To approach the question, a set of studies were implemented following mixed methods research. The first question to be addressed concerned the capacity to create, implement and test the impact of a VR based tool on the BD context. Accordingly, a rudimentary VR-based tool was developed and tested, in the pedagogic context of a BD-derived curricular unit. Its impact was assessed on the students’ creativity level; barriers to creativity; motivation; performance; and emotional state during the experience. The following study aimed the identification of the learning outcomes (LOs) that future VR based tools should address, for which a new study was conducted to recognize BD in the Portuguese HE system, as well as its most representative learning outcomes (LOs). Were identified: i) the curricular units that teach DB; ii) the LOs, defined by their components: levels of understanding and content topics; iii) and the most significant combinations between those components. Subsequently, was addressed the question: How can BD reflect its holistic nature in the present HE system? A conceptual framework-model that connects the theoretical-philosophical premises of BD and the LOs was proposed. The conceptual framework-model may enable the design of holistic BD learning activities, tools and experiences in general, including the ones that use digital technology. The final question concerned the expectations of the BD students to use iVR-based tools for learning the design fundamentals holistically. An online questionnaire identified that the expectations of previous BD students to use the iVR-based tools for several phases of the teaching learning process is high, as well as for performing the LOs, particularly for surpassing the learning of the most difficult content topic, 3D form creation. It is therefore proposed that the conceptual framework-model can be used for assisting the design of innovative pedagogical tools based on VR, that supports BD holistic premises, thus contributing to a more consistent integration of iVR-based tools in BD pedagogy. Hopefully, this can lead to the acquisition of more and better skills among design students while reaffirming the holistic character of the BD teaching-learning process, particularly when assisted by iVR-based tools