Design Education as a Special Pedagogical Area

Abstract

Introduction. Design education in Russia has been going through a complex, more than a century-long path of reforming and reorganizing educational institutions and the pedagogical process. The rethinking and processing of pedagogical concepts in the fields of education focused on training in-demand specialists takes place in parallel with external global processes on the basis of existing and new scientific knowledge, technology development, as well as ideas about the creative potential of the individual as a whole, and the tasks of the designer as a specialist, in particular, which is acutely relevant in modern realities. The purpose of the article is to study the semantic content of such key terms for pedagogy as the educational field and the education system, as well as the derivation of design education into a separate educational system. Methodology and methods of research. The methodological basis of the research was the following scientific methods: the phenomenological method, through which we identified the main features of the use of certain terms in contradictory meanings, in particular such terms as “educational environment”, “educational field”, “educational industry”, “subject area”; structural and functional method analyzing stable relationships and the relationship between the elements of the concepts considered in the article; the method of comparative analysis, which allowed us to identify common and different in the concepts under study and offer our own vision of the design education system at the present stage. The result of our research is the conclusion that design education, having a special subject area (area of professional activity), can be defined into a separate educational system, meeting the needs of the modern design industry. As a conclusion, we propose to consider design education from the point of view of an independent educational system, which will enable educational institutions to revise the structure and content of design education to increase efficiency in training highly qualified specialists and, as a consequence, to increase the level of economic achievements of the country.