ProVi – a transforming vision emerging from reflective practice

Over the past decades, design education has embraced notions related to self-directed learning, reflective practices, and lifelong learning. This perspective has led to the creation of various resources for design education and design practice, among which the Personal Development Plan which has played a central role in the ID Competence Framework at the ID Department of Eindhoven University of Technology. Over nearly 15 years of use, we propose an “updated” version of the PDP to strengthen its benefits from a programmatical and methodological perspective. The updated version, named Projected Vision (ProVi), is composed of five elements to structure a reflective and operatable vision for design practice. The five elements, described in depth in this paper, are: a reflective space, a framework inspired by the annotated portfolio approach and structured by dimensions that coherently supports the rest of the reflective practice; a horizon, a vision statement which attention will be directed towards; a standpoint, a declaration of where one stands at the time of working with ProVi, in reference to the reflective space; a path (or a map when complex choices are involved); and a refreshing moment to reconsider the first four elements. Tested by design Master degree students at the National Conservatory of Arts and Craft in France, ProVi was shown to critically support students’ reflection of their practice and of the strategy for future professional development.