‘Does it matter?’: Learning through Aesthetic Experiences in a Higher Education Communication Design Course

Teaching and learning in higher education have increasingly separated knowledge-making processes from individual and social becoming. The material turn reclaims the uncertainty related to knowing and gives attention to the intertwinement of learning, doing, and being. The purpose of this article is to use insights from pragmatist aesthetics and feminist new materialism to explore an unusual learning process in higher education. The reported situation is a design process with a group of undergraduate students of the course in Communication and Digital Media at a Danish university, who inquire through materialisations—writing, sketching, and building with LEGO bricks. In this study, the relational agency among humans and objects offers evidence of both sense-making negotiations and emotions as core elements of learning. The narrative shows how students’ aesthetic experiences are enabled by/entangled with matter, as discursive micro-negotiations and participatory sense-making become intentional actions. On the other hand, aesthetic experiences create disturbance, uncertainty, and confusion, proving meaningful as they challenge students’ established conception of knowledge. The unconventional proposal brings a possibility of transformation for the learner, as well as for the teacher. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.