Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate divergent and convergent paths while designing. However, design feedback is often met with resistance, which counteracts its potential to help novice designers evaluate their design and generate new solution directions. In this paper, we report on the construction and utilization of a design feedback intervention during a real-life design project with a group of primary school children (aged 8-12). The goal of the intervention was to stimulate young novice designers' creative thinking by guiding the design feedback dialogues with their peers and clients. The intervention was designed according to the following key principles: (1) guide towards a shared understanding of the design through low-level convergent feedback, (2) stimulate critical reflection and evaluation of the design to help identify and internalize possible shortcomings through high-level convergent feedback, and (3) provide a way to move forward by guiding new generative thoughts through highlevel divergent feedback. Overall, the results show that the intervention can support young novice designers, their peers, and clients in engaging in constructive feedback dialogues, thereby stimulating their creative thinking. Our main contribution entails a detailed understanding of the successes and obstacles within the feedback dialogues, as guided by the intervention. Based on these results, we propose a set of refined design principles to inform feedback interventions. With this research we hope to give insight in the complexity of design feedback dialogues, while also inspiring design educators to actively try out these key principles.
In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept development stage of children's design processes. This type of fixation, which we named: concept fixation, causes a blind adherence to the current (possibly unfavourable) state of a design idea. Its occurrence hampers the creative thinking processes present in a design process, which in turn stagnates the development of initial design ideas into final designs. Until now, research on design fixation has mainly focussed on creative idea generation in the early phases of the design process through analysing (intermediate) design ideas and completed artefacts. However, children's fixation behaviours might be identified at an earlier moment through the conversations that take place in the classroom about their design ideas. To this end, we present a case study in which we explored early indicators of concept fixation of a group of 24 primary school children (ages 9-11) carrying out a co-design project. Fixation was observed through the manner in which the design teams responded to questions and comments from their peers and the client. Four categories of response behaviours indicating concept fixation emerged from the verbal data, namely: 'band-aids', 'already-in-there', 'question-not-relevant' and 'it's-not-possible'. We expect that the indicators will be helpful in identifying concept fixation during the design process, especially in an educational context. The process of identification of fixation, and reflecting on it, creates awareness. This is considered as an important step by professional designers towards guarding oneself from fixation episodes in future projects, and thus being more creative.A. Schut et al.
No abstract
Today, it has been broadly acknowledged in the CCI community that children are not only active learners and users of technology, but can also actively participate in the design process. However, it remains challenging to analyze children's experiences and creative contributions resulting from co-design activities (e.g. stories, paper prototypes, enacted ideas). This workshop will explore different ways to analyze children's (0 to 18 years) experiences and contributions in co-design activities, the perceived benefits and challenges of these approaches, and will serve as a venue for synthesizing productive practices that will move the CCI community forward.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.