Design Education and Learning
“Spend another day in our class talking about this research please”: Student insights from a research-based design thinking exercise
Cynthia Atman, Ahmer Arif, Kathryn Shroyer, Jennifer Turns, Jim Borgford-Parnell
University of Washington, USA (4)
atman@uw.edu
Keywords: design pedagogy; guided discovery; design representations; design expertise
Abstract
This paper explores how guided discovery can be used to connect insights from the ever-growing body of research on design processes with design teaching. This paper focuses on a specific instance of a guided discovery activity in which engineering students were invited to engage with selected timelines from a study of designer processes; guidance included prompts at two points in time. The goal was to see if the students could discover meaningful insights about the design process and what features of design processes contribute to quality solutions. The students in this study succeeded in discovering six meaningful insights about the design process. The distribution of students’ insights was not the same at the two time-points, suggesting that the guidance is important in what students discovered. Our findings speak to the value of the specific guided discovery activity that we studied, and the overall idea of developing activities using guided discovery.
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Cite this paper: Atman, C., Arif, A., Shroyer, K., Turns, J., Borgford-Parnell, J. (2016). “Spend another day in our class talking about this research please”: Student insights from a research-based design thinking exercise. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme