Involvement of users in the design process is generally viewed favourably, both within academia and industry. Their involvement can be seen as a strategy for designers to clarify their design task and reduce uncertainties in the design process. Simultaneously, there is a lack of understanding about the impact that user involvement has on students and how they experience doing so. This paper reports on a study where students were asked to self-report their motivation and self-confidence throughout a design exercise, stretching 11 days, with surveys repeating daily. Additionally, students were asked to indicate which-if any-strategies of user involvement they used every day. We find that students self-reported motivation did not change statistically significantly, while self-confidence did change. However, in neither case did student's involvement of end-users impact how motivated or self-confident they were. We discuss our results in relation to existing research on method use in general and user involvement in particular and conclude with some suggestions for future work.
Scientists and designers show different problem-solving strategies. Where scientists generally adopt a strategy of analysis; designers are more inclined to solve a problem by synthesis. Instead of striving for a deep understanding and analysis of the problem, a designer tackles a problem by quickly generating a satisfactory solution. Prototyping is one of the tools for designers to conceptualise and realise new product solutions. Fifteen students in their final year at the university following Political and Communication Sciences received an introduction to the programs Makey Makey and Scratch. All participants had little to no experience with programming and prototyping. The reflections on the workshop are described from a teacher and students' point of view through qualitative interviews and a post survey. Results shine a light on the level of enjoyment, satisfaction and barriers of the students about the new learned tools. We conclude that interactive prototyping for non-designers is valuable and other non-design disciplines can quickly integrate such tools.
Innovation has been a major force for improving economic and social conditions for humans. Yet, it has also brought a number of unintended and often unpredictable consequences that affect potentially all stakeholders. Debates over 'the responsibility of innovation' have become commonplace in industrial and social forums alike. Technological innovations, especially, are often viewed as a pressure on normative ethics that exclude unrestricted or flexible options. This paper draws upon the outcomes of a 4-day interactive design workshop attended by fifty-six graduate students on the subject of the 'education of the future' at a higher education institution in China. Moral dilemmas were incorporated in the project activities during the design thinking process [1]. By imagining the future of education through creativity techniques, uncertainties from the macro environment of the innovation were revealed and used as tools for the design propositions. This paper aims to illustrate how exploring unknown and potentially problematic situations can help students develop an awareness of the ways ethical considerations can generate legitimate ideas for developing questions that could lead to new design solutions. Although the reflections described in this paper are limited to the experience of the workshop, the value of providing a reproducible framework by which design education facilitators may address ethical dilemmas in problem-based learning contexts, is briefly discussed.
With the new industries on the horizon, where design engineers will become facilitators of innovation that need to keep up with an array of new technologies, it is essential that our students are equipped with skills in line with this new role. From literature describing emerging paradigms (Skills for Industry 4.0, and 21 st century skills) it becomes clear that students need life-long learning skills, which have been linked to reflective thinking and learning during critique. However, at our university we noticed that students needed to be assisted in this. Students seem unable to translate the discussion points during critique sessions to design actions or challenge teachers' feedback with counter arguments. Therefore, it is important to establish clear goals and consistency of actions between teachers. This paper will report on the development of such goals through a critique workshop with lecturers and focus groups with students. The outcome of the development is a template with responsibilities for both the feedback-giver (lecturer) and recipient (student). These responsibilities are categorized in actions before, during, and after the critique is given in an effort to trigger reflection at various moments. With this template we hope to provide different anchors for both student and lecturer to have insightful critique moments. By sharing our experiences, we wish to inspire other design engineering lecturer teams to try to come to their own shared understanding of what critique should entail and how responsibilities between lecturers and students are divided.
No abstract
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.