This licentiate thesis is based on visual art didactics and the school subject visual art, but focuses on the design process in a college design education. The aim is to explore and understand the innovative and exploratory learning processes and the importance of visual mediation in this context. With a phenomenological approach the study focuses on design students experiences in this context. These experiences are made subject on reflection and formulation, through phenomenology and visual semiotics. The empirical materal of the study consists of interviews and sketches and images collected from student workbooks.

The results of the study show that the design process does not occur by itself among the students. It must be learned. The need for learning probably also applies to the processes of creative learning in other fields. Furthermore, the results indicate that the process is best understood and appropriated in pragmatic learning situations.

Three kinds of visual representations of the basic aims of process work are identified in the analysis: images for communicative purposes, images for reference and discussion purposes and images as a support for one's own thinking.

From the perspective of visual art dididactics the results of the study reveals four important dimensions, wich may be of relevance as a fundamental didactic structure in efforts to promote understanding of a practice-oriented learning in context of visual mediations. Together with a split vision guiding principles, existing premises and action-based learning processes may provide a supporting unit in this structure. Based on the results, it seems important that pupils and students have the opportunity to learn to master and appropriate the creative process in order to use it in an investigative purpose. Considering the structure of the process, a didactic model can facilitate learning and at the same time provide a valuable complement to the subjective approach of inspiration in the aestetic learning process.

In summary, the results of the study indicate that the fields of design and didactics are related to each other and that the field of design training can bring knowledge and experience of exploration and creative learning processes to the school subject visual art.