Appropriate Knowledges: An Exploration of South African Industrial Design Curricula in the Era of 4IR

Since the era of the first industrial revolution, design has played a significant role in bringing about social-economic transformation through technology and yet it still holds great potential to encourage human flourishing in the future. However, as the making of things is getting smarter, a higher level of critical design thinking will be required to fulfil human needs more sustainably. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has been proposed as a new frontier and South African educational institutions have been charged to develop content to meet the needs of learners for this new era. This paper documents a study that explored the curricula of Industrial Design programmes offered in four South African Higher Education institutions. The study employed a literature review and thematic analysis as exploratory methods for unbundling the 4IR components of these programmes. The findings documented to what extent these curricula had been designed to sufficiently prepare graduates for the future world of work in the highly unequal South African context.