Influences of feedback interventions on student concept generation and development practices

Design teaching in many disciplines relies on feedback as a primary way for students and instructors to communicate. Our work focused on identifying feedback types in three different design disciplines (dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering) and analyzing how those feedback types encouraged students to take convergent or divergent paths with their design ideas. We then compared feedback types and encouragement of convergence or divergence across the three disciplines. Our findings showed many common types of feedback used across the three disciplines, regardless of variance in context and expectations. However, the findings also revealed a high frequency of feedback suggesting convergence or not pushing in either direction. While design processes aim to identify the most promising solution through a series of convergence steps, divergence is equally critical throughout the entire process, and this work suggests a consideration of when and how to integrate feedback supporting divergence throughout design processes

Directing Convergent and Divergent Activity through Design Feedback.

Design education across design disciplines prioritizes project-based courses to support student learning about design processes and strategies (Eastman, Newstetter, & McCracken, 1999; Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). Success in teaching these courses relies on the ability of instructors to mentor and guide students\u27 design paths, allowing students some freedom to determine design decisions on their own, while facilitating a structure where they can learn successful design strategies

Returning to Graduate School: Expectations of Success, Values of the Degree, and Managing the Costs

Background Limited research exists on the experiences of engineering returners – those with undergraduate degrees who work for at least five years and return to academia for graduate degrees. Returners bring a different perspective to their graduate studies and postgraduate work than direct‐pathway students but face additional challenges. Purpose Our aim was to understand practitioners' decisions to return to graduate school and complete graduate degrees. Guided by expectancy value theory, we investigated their beliefs about their ability to succeed; the interest, attainment, and utility values returners placed on graduate school; the costs they experienced in returning; and the personal, programmatic, and cultural factors that mitigated these costs. Design/Method We employed a qualitative interpretivist approach to investigate the returning experience through semi‐structured interviews with 10 returners. We analyzed the results deductively, using expectancy value theory to understand participants' expectations of success and the values of those experiences, and inductively, to understand the types of costs that influenced the decision to return and complete graduate school. Results Utility value drove participants' decisions to return and complete graduate programs, and participants had a high expectancy of success in earning their graduate degrees. Four types of costs emerged from analysis of the interviews: intellectual, balance, cultural and environmental, and financial. Participants employed various strategies to mitigate these costs. Conclusions With the results of our study, potential returners can more effectively plan for success in the graduate environment, and universities can develop initiatives to better recruit returners and support their success.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99102/1/jee20012.pd

What Does it Mean to Design? A Qualitative Investigation of Design Professionals' Experiences

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95041/1/j.2168-9830.2012.tb00048.x.pd

Teaching Creative Process across Disciplines

While there is great interest in higher education about teaching creative process, there have been relatively few studies of how courses can facilitate the development of creative skills. The goal of this study was to document how college instructors structure courses intended to develop students’ creative processes. The study data included interviews from instructors and students using a critical case sample of fifteen courses at a single U.S. University. A qualitative analysis of the transcripts yielded a set of 14 pedagogical elements appearing across courses. Common elements were open‐ended projects and skill‐building activities, and less frequently, risk taking experiences and self‐reflection. The sample included undergraduate courses in engineering, education, the liberal arts, and the arts, and the elements observed were often shared across courses from different disciplines. These findings provide a diverse set of pedagogical approaches and opportunities for building creative process skills within undergraduate courses.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148345/1/jocb158.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148345/2/jocb158_am.pd

Drivers of research topic selection for engineering doctoral students

In this study, we explored engineering doctoral students’ motivations for selecting their research topic. The extent to whichindividuals are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and the autonomy they have to make their own decisions hasimplications for their enjoyment of and success at a particular task. Given the importance of motivation, we sought toaddress a gap in the understanding of how doctoral students in engineering decide on a particular problem to study. Ourfindings are based on interviews with students with varying past educational and professional experiences that enable us tocapture a wide range of motivations for engineering PhD students’ research subject decisions. We found that the majorityof students interviewed reported some form of extrinsic motivation guiding their decision, though these students varied intheir autonomy to select their own topic. Of the students who reported intrinsic motivations for their research topicselection, many had extensive prior work experience that informed their topic choice. Funding played a major role inshaping students’ project decisions, which is reflective of the scale and expense of much of engineering work. However, ourfindings suggest there are a number of opportunities for students to identify research topics in which they personallyperceive as important and interesting

How do designers generate new ideas? Design heuristics across two disciplines

Research supports the central role cognitive strategies can play in successful concept generation by individual designers. Design heuristics have been shown to facilitate the creation of new design concepts in the early, conceptual stage of the design process, as well as throughout the development of ideas. However, we know relatively little about their use in differing disciplines. This study examined evidence of design heuristic use in a protocol study with 12 mechanical engineers and 12 industrial designers who worked individually to develop multiple concepts. The open-ended design problem was for a novel product, and the designers’ sketches and comments were recorded as they worked on the problem for 25 min and in a retrospective interview. The results showed frequent use of design heuristics in both disciplines and a significant relationship to the rated creativity of the concepts. Though industrial designers used more heuristics in their concepts, there was a high degree of similarity in heuristic use. Some differences between design disciplines were observed in the choice of design heuristics, where industrial designers showed a greater emphasis on user experience, environmental contexts, and added features. These findings demonstrate the prevalence of design heuristics in individual concept generation and their effectiveness in generating creative concepts, across two design domains