Higher Certificate programmes serve as a bridge for students who do not meet the entry requirements for degree programmes, providing an opportunity to acquire the essential skills they may be lacking to complete or gain access to undergraduate studies of their choice. For these programmes to be effective, curriculum design must fully consider the Higher Certificate students as individuals with specific and unique learning needs, who often enter with varying levels of academic preparedness. Curriculum designers often assume that students already possess certain skills, including digital competencies and soft skills such as planning and time management. However, a lack of these skills might contribute to poor academic performance.

Collaboration is recognised as essential in the process of solving large-scale complex problems and can therefore be observed in both the design industry and in design education. As part of design collaboration, design teams go through a process of framing the design problem, proposing potential solutions, and taking the steps required to produce an outcome. Framing, as originally defined by Schön (1999), provides a method to identify the decisions that a design team takes on their journey to establish potential design solutions. Ideally, for a collaboration to be successful design teams need to arrive at a share frame characterised by a common understanding of the problem, solution, and actions.