locating the emerging design identity of students through visual and textual reflection
DESCRIPTION
Reflective activities have the potential to encourage students to develop critical skills and awareness of mental models. In this study, I address the emerging identity of early design students as they externalize their evolving conceptions of design through visual and textual reflection. Forty-three students in an introductory human-computer interaction (HCI) course completed weekly textual reflections on a course blog, and completed visual reflections at the conclusion of each of three projects. The weekly blog reflections were intended to document their experience as a developing designer, while the visual reflections represented their personal conception of design within HCI—their rendering of the “whole game”. Through this process of reflection, students externalized their transformation as designers, including an awareness of the pedagogical, social, and cultural factors shaping them, and a growing sense of their personal and professional design identity. Through interviews and additional analysis of eight of these students, a disjuncture was found between conceptions of design in visual and textual reflections, with visual reflections forming a professional, generic design identity, and textual reflections more congruent with the student’s personal identity. Issues relating to lack of representational skill and how these forms of reflection externalize a student’s evolving design philosophy are addressed.TRANSCRIPT
look upon this jurisdiction with renewed jollity. This jargon that threatens to jjourney, no mere jolly junket, is justified by our juxtaposition of ambition and can call me J.
Well now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’m Jared! My journey herethink about it, the more I realized I was destined to become a designer f
I was actually born in Bloomington, but haven’t actually lived here for mhere, near the Indiana/Ohio border. After high school, in a rather bizarreundergrad after falling in love with the campus and the friendly people freshman, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with course guide in hand and a
And that’s when the trouble started.
Fast forward to two semesters later and I’m in the midst of an existentiaPhilosophy, Comparative Literature, Political Science, and Psychology. Itrealized I had to put aside my tendencies to dabble in just about any padriven primarily by the solid instruction in that department, and my fascdecisions. I even picked up a minor in Global Culture along the way, andWisconsin Experience.
But when the diploma met my hand on graduation day (well, metaphorivictory. I was no doubt proud of my accomplishment, but a part of me fearrived. And so I did what every graduate from my class of 2009 did; fill
Funny thing about job applications, particularly those for the federal gonot unusual to not hear back for 4-6 months, a fact I only found out latepolitical connections, so several interviews later, I found myself at an unit wasn’t even this job, or the one I took at a polling and research firm layears later, in my last 6 months with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, that it all
My day-to-day duties at the USAO mainly involved supporting a team ofdrafting, filing, I did a little bit of everything. But it wasn’t until I got sorecords for everything from phone records to bank and hotel statements
VISUAL + TEXTUAL REFLECTION
Colin M. Gray Iowa State University
16 JUNE 2014
locating the emerging design identity of students through
grounding this work❖ Sketching as an expression of design reasoning
(Buxton, 2007; Do & Gross, 1996; Verstijnen, et al., 1998) ❖ A general focus on mechanics of sketching, but not on how
sketching can relate to identity development and externalizations of one's unique design philosophy (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012)
❖ Reflection as a tool to externalize how a student is thinking about design (Gray & Siegel, 2013; Siegel & Stolterman, 2008)
Sketching Design Thinking (Gray & Siegel, 2013)
CONTEXT
(Gray, 2014)
DATA
DATA
Introductory course in interaction design
1 graduate design course
43 students
109 sketches 513 posts
Viewing education in a holistic, action-driven way (Perkins, 2010)
participants
NameCountry of Origin
Educational Background
Sketches (by project) Posts Comments
Thomas United States Philosophy 3 9 17
Jack United States Journalism 1,2 11 56
Naveen India Engineering 1,2,3 6 12
Isabella Mexico Computer Science 1,2,3 17 29
Parker United States Computer Science 1,2,3 10 7
Mei-Xing China Telecommunications 1,3 16 46
Adrian United States Education 2,3 15 28
Zachary United States Political Science 1,3 17 27
participants
NameCountry of Origin
Educational Background
Sketches (by project) Posts Comments
Thomas United States Philosophy 3 9 17
Jack United States Journalism 1,2 11 56
Naveen India Engineering 1,2,3 6 12
Isabella Mexico Computer Science 1,2,3 17 29
Parker United States Computer Science 1,2,3 10 7
Mei-Xing China Telecommunications 1,3 16 46
Adrian United States Education 2,3 15 28
Zachary United States Political Science 1,3 17 27
PARKER computer science
case #1
“the design process seemed like a flowchart”
“I wholly expect everyone to fail miserably out of the gate and I welcome it”
“I had a little breakdown in how I was prioritizing my life [...] so I was a little distant”
NAVEEN engineering
case #2
!
“[the professor] wants us to feel exhausted and suffocated by the way ‘we think’ design work is done”
“[you] shouldn’t be attached to your design ideas”
“[the professor] wants us to feel exhausted and suffocated by the way ‘we think’
design work is done”
ISABELLA computer science
case #3
“I didn’t thinking how I felt mattered.”
“what will design mess up?”
“Oh, there will be blood on room 150 by the end”
DISCUSSION
Disjuncture between visual and textual reflections1
“in design, people on both sides
leave their mark” ZACHARY
Visual representation in early design education2
Revealing conceptions of designerly identity3
3“felt forced—
having to reflect” THOMAS
implications❖ Affordances of multiple types of reflection should be
considered when constructing design education experiences
❖ Consideration must be made for incoming skill level, both in writing and visual/spatial reasoning
❖ Value as a diagnostic tool for professors to see externalized conceptions of design (but they can be wrong!)
❖ Beyond mechanical sketching or writing ability to what those abilities tell us about the developing designer
thank youmartin a. siegel, erik stolterman,
omar sosa-tzec, jordan beck nsf grant #1115532