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.

Keywords

design pedagogy; guided discovery; design representations; design expertise

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Jun 17th, 12:00 AM

“Spend another day in our class talking about this research please”: Student insights from a research - based design thinking exercise

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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