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

No abstract

In this paper, a new perspective is developed to promote a positive relationship between young people and technology. An in-depth study of the values young Dutch secondary school students feel are essential in their future profession was made. Following organisational psychologist Edgar Schein, we distinguish career anchors, each with their own core value. These core values show that differences between young people are considerable and explain why it is often so difficult to get grip on the decisive factors in the choice of a career. Although all girls have to deal with the masculine image of technology, they are not a homogenuous group as they pursue different values. Many of the anchors can be fullfilled by following study and career path in technology. However, current careers in technology are insufficiently associated with values such as creativity, service, autonomy and entrepeneurial. The educational system has been emphasizing the functional, expert anchor, but is gradually changing and preparing for the rise of the creative society that has been described by the economist Richard Florida. In contrast with Schein, we show that career anchors can already be indentified in secondary school students and added a new anchor identity.