KNOWLEDGE OBJECTIVES: DESIGN INTENTIONS IN INFORMATION DESIGN EDUCATION

Within Information Design education, project outcomes are often assessed in terms of formal quality and process coherence, while students' intentions often remain implicit and difficult to evaluate. This paper introduces a methodology based on Knowledge Objectives (KO) as a pedagogical tool to make design intentions explicit, assess how projects contribute to knowledge acquisition, and support a structured evaluation of students’ outcomes. Drawing on the notion of learning goals, we define KO as statements specifying the knowledge Information Design artefacts aims to activate in the audience through visual features, which we call Knowledge Activators (KA). The methodology unfolds across five phases and is designed to be flexible and adaptable to different teaching contexts. Rather than imposing predefined knowledge categories, students are guided to articulate what knowledge is at stake and how design can make it understandable. Within this framework, KO guide strategic and operational decisions, support evaluation, and provide benchmarks for assessing whether intended knowledge outcomes have been achieved. The paper presents three classroom implementations with Communication Design students at Politecnico di Milano, at both Bachelor’s and Master’s level. Across the three cases, KO functioned as a shared vocabulary for making design processes more critical, traceable and open to evaluation. The paper discusses the potential of this methodology for Communication Design education and related fields, as well as its limitations and conditions of use.