A CRITICAL CURATION OF SOLUTION REPERTOIRE BY FIRST TIME DESIGN STUDENTS

Aletta Smits, Koen van Turnhout

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingContribution to conference proceedingAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Design education has a nuanced relationship with examples. Although they are considered useful teaching tools, their use is often restricted to illustrating the design theories and principles around which the curriculum is structured. In contrast, professional designers view examples as autonomous entities and use them to initiate a critical dialogue with their current problem space. Therefore, students should be facilitated in cultivating their own repertoire of solutions and learn to initiate conversations between existing solutions and design challenges to gain a better understanding of the problem space and generate new designs. This paper outlines a small-scale experiment conducted with master's students in Applied Data Science at Utrecht University who took a course on designing recommender system interfaces. The students were provided with a set of examples of recommender interface designs as their main instructional tool. They could use this set to curate their own solution repertoire. As a result, the majority of the participants' work displayed more diverse designs, and they used design patterns distilled from those examples generatively, developing innovative designs. Based on this case study, we tentatively conclude that a design curriculum built around examples, complemented by theories, could be advantageous, as long as special attention is given to helping students initiate fruitful iterations between their challenges and a set of solutions.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDS 123
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: Responsible Innovation for Global Co-Habitation, E and PDE 2023
PublisherThe Design Society
Pages85-90
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781912254194
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

SeriesProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: Responsible Innovation for Global Co-Habitation, E and PDE 2023

Keywords

  • solution repertoire
  • curriculum design
  • exemplars
  • problem space
  • professional practice

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