Unlearning Obedience: Reframing Assessment to Foster Creative Risk

Authority and obedience have long shaped the foundations of higher education and conventional understandings of knowledge acquisition. In design education, however, the capabilities most often associated with innovation, including adaptability, divergent thinking, collaboration and creative risk-taking, can sit in tension with assessment systems that reward compliance, predictability and risk minimisation. This paper presents a pedagogical proposition that reframes these capabilities as forms of intelligent disobedience and considers their relationship to contemporary assessment practices. Drawing on student experience data, evidence-informed personas and a speculative classroom scenario, we use speculative design as a mode of pedagogical inquiry to explore tensions between institutional aspirations, learner agency and assessment structures. Through this reflective lens, the paper considers how assessment may enable or constrain creative risk-taking in design education and examines the implications of these tensions for assessment design. We propose that competency-based assessment (CBA) may offer an alternative to traditional numerical grading by creating greater space for experimentation, revision and learning through failure. In doing so, CBA may better align assessment practices with the forms of adaptability, criticality and creative risk-taking that design education seeks to cultivate.