Abstract
Design education is centered on making and reflecting, as a way to `work through' the process of becoming a designer. To do this, we rely on project-based learning that often culminates in reports alongside demonstrations and show-and-tell. Over the years, we have seen an increased reliance on language to validate student design ideas, and written reflections have become a way of assessing learning. With Generative AI becoming more widespread, such deliverables risk becoming less reflective or even meaningless. At the same time, some of our students treat written reflections as a necessary evil to be done on the eve of the deadline. To playfully address this, we devised a report format for our course that builds on annotated portfolios and workbooks and tries to discourage writing altogether. Show don't tell! In this work in progress, we present the format and report on our ongoing experiments with different ways to assess design student work.
Keywords
Assessment; Workbooks; Annotated portfolios; Reflections
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1183
Citation
Andersen, K., Frens, J.,and Huang, J.Y.(2025) Show, Don't Tell: Looking for New/Old Strategies for Assessing Design Work, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1183
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 12 - Design Education
Show, Don't Tell: Looking for New/Old Strategies for Assessing Design Work
Design education is centered on making and reflecting, as a way to `work through' the process of becoming a designer. To do this, we rely on project-based learning that often culminates in reports alongside demonstrations and show-and-tell. Over the years, we have seen an increased reliance on language to validate student design ideas, and written reflections have become a way of assessing learning. With Generative AI becoming more widespread, such deliverables risk becoming less reflective or even meaningless. At the same time, some of our students treat written reflections as a necessary evil to be done on the eve of the deadline. To playfully address this, we devised a report format for our course that builds on annotated portfolios and workbooks and tries to discourage writing altogether. Show don't tell! In this work in progress, we present the format and report on our ongoing experiments with different ways to assess design student work.