Conference Agenda

This study analyses emotional wellbeing and the learning process of design students in a globally distributed learning environment. Currently students are known for their capabilities to find information, to learn and think, to socialize and to behave in a global network, but difficulties operating in a distributed product development process have emerged.

Global co-habituation via social networks, blogging, and other user-generated internet content have helped to connect student partner teams in different time zones and cultures, but have raised questions of learning practices within pluralistic, co-habituative and virtual learning environment in design.

Uncertainty of design process as a learning object, tackling outcomes from each of the design stages that are informing the subsequent design stage and performing from two different ‘personas’ (the client and the designer) by not knowing prior which role they will assume has contrinuted to emotional ill-being amongst students. During the learning process via distributed product development students were constantly surveyed and questioned to understand how they felt and what was their emotional wellbeing point in a learning ecosystem which they experience and practice for the first time.

The analysis of learning process outlines that it is crucial to have supportive and enabling technologies and lecturers for virtual learning to create a positive, global distributed, learning experience. The learning process aimed to enable students to work successfully with various organisational members in the distributed product development process while emotional underpinning of the learning process was described as frustrating and confusing.

Design and Technology (D&T) and Technology Education (TE) are commonly offered as general education subjects in secondary school education in Europe, America, Oceania, and Asia. In D&T and TE, students are exposed to design areas such as visual communication design, product design, and textile/fashion. The design nature of the D&T and TE subject enables students to experience and participate in inventive and creative processes to develop new ideas. In Singapore, the framework for 21 Century Competencies (21CC) and Students Outcomes was formalised in 2010 as one of the most significant efforts in 21CC education. Aligning with the 21CC framework, D&T in Singapore aimed to cultivate students' critical thinking through design-and-make projects. In design-and-make projects, students are required to identify design problems, ideate, develop ideas, and realize a working prototype. In design-and-make projects, students record their thought processes in design journals. When assessing students' design journals, there is a lack of evaluation methods to evaluate the quality of students' critical thinking.

Focusing on Singapore D&T, this study aims to conceptualize an evaluation method that may assess students' quality of critical thinking during the ideation process through design journals. This study sought to answer two central questions. Firstly, how do we unpack students' critical thinking process during ideation through the design journal? Secondly, upon unpacking students' critical thinking processes, how do we evaluate the quality of students' critical thinking processes during ideation through the design journals?

The research adopts a qualitative approach to structure this study as a case study using a Singapore government school. Singa Secondary School (the school's name used is a pseudonym) was selected for this study due to the progressive D&T program that it has established. A design journal done by an upper secondary student in Design Project A for a D&T Express course is used as a study object to test the effectiveness of the evaluation method established by the current study.

Based on the literature review, the critical thinking model by Paul and Elder was adopted to dissect students' reasoning processes in the design journal. Using the required student outcomes for Design Project A, evaluation criteria to evaluate students' reasoning process was contextualized and articulated using the concepts of Intellectual Standards by Paul and Elder. The student's reasoning process in ideation in the study object was evaluated using the evaluation criteria established. This study showed that students' reasoning processes could be dissected and evaluated by adopting the evaluation method established in this study. The evaluation method conceptualized in this study provides a flexible method that can be adopted in different design-and-make projects. However, to contextualize and articulate the evaluation criteria accurately, the student outcomes for the project need to be clearly articulated. The current evaluation method may still be subjected to teachers' subjective assessment. Thus, standardization meetings among teachers will be necessary to achieve consistency in evaluation by different teachers.

Designing for a circular economy introduces complex networks, collaborations, and relationships into the context of product design. Increasingly, the context within which young undergraduate and postgraduate students of product design and engineering are designing within is represented not only by the customer or the user of their products, but also includes a wide range of stakeholders, services, and systems. As the design process expands from technocentric and user-centric to include and reference the wider context of designing for people and communities within complex product, service, system, and environmental relationships of a circular economy, it becomes increasingly challenging for product design and engineering students to cope with and design within a more holistic and complex product-service-ecosystem. How do you avoid designing in the abstraction of system diagrams and stakeholder maps to design for people, communities and the planet?

In 2000-2001, founders of LiveWork and Engine service design consultancies, being product designers before specialising in service design, have long recognised the need to see the people engaged with services and understand the ‘highly complicated networks of relationships between people inside and outside the service organisation’ (Polaine et al, 2013, p.36). Borrowing from systems and actor network theories, service designers developed journey-maps, relationship maps and service blueprints to bring service ecosystems to life, capturing and communicating insights from research and observations, visualising people and their relationships within the service ecology. Product designers have since borrowed from service design methods helping them to more deeply understand and empathise with people they are designing for and with (Bailey, 2012). This paper discusses the integration of service design methods within a product design process that enables students to: identify and communicate design opportunities from design ethnographic research; explore design opportunities as value propositions; identify and share the core values and proposed benefits of circular design opportunities; develop and present product-service concepts.

This paper discusses the multidisciplinary nature of designing for the circular economy requiring product designers and engineers to investigate, understand and communicate a wide range of stakeholder relationships and interactions when developing their design propositions, building empathy and trust. Service design tools such as stakeholder mapping visualise actor networks and product-service ecosystems; their relationships, interactions and behaviours, bringing the systems and actors to life. Journey maps record observational research and can be used as analytical tools to build insights and visualise the key value propositions of the product-service design. Service-blueprints visualise how different product-service pathways interact across time. Integrating these methods and tools into the product design process helps the product design engineering students to ‘see’ and communicate key insights from their research to share and communicate the circular value propositions offered by the design.

ABSTRACT

We observed novice designers, especially the young, have difficulties empathizing with target groups who are significantly different from them in terms of age, capabilities, culture and cognitively. In addition, they often confuse empathy with sympathy, and their design solutions show an element of condescension.

As Nadan and Stark (2017, p. 685) noted. “Learning about ‘Others’ brings with it the risk of over-generalization, as well as the risk of overlooking the intersectionality of different categories of difference… and other personal circumstances and attributes. This, in turn, can lead to stereotypical attitudes towards people and the tendency to ignore their unique needs and life stories…. Such an approach may promote the view of groups as natural, homogenous, static and detached from macro structures”. In other words, this is an antithesis to the inclusive design paradigm - Which is all about recognizing the diversity and designing to accommodate it.

To address the above problem, we have employed two strategies;

1. Transformational teaching, that creates a dynamic relationship between teachers, students and a shared body of knowledge to encourage learning and personal growth (Slavich & Zimbardo, 2012). This is achieved through situated learning with teachers acting as intellectual coaches who provide guidance as and when required.

2. Pedagogy of discomfort, According to Boler (2004, p. 176) pedagogy of discomfort as a teaching practice aims at disorienting learners through unsettling their taken-for-granted assumptions; and consequently, engaging them in ‘collective witnessing’, ‘mutual exploration’ and ‘deliberate listening’. This is achieved by designing the learning context to engage students in an activity that is both surprising and required them to un-anchor from their comfort zone.

This paper shares our experience using the strategies mentioned above to teach empathic design to novice designers. We discuss our findings around two case studies; one is an interdisciplinary course comprising students from visual design, industrial design and nursing working together in a culturally diverse environment to solve a real-world problem based on ageing and dignity. Two, a dedicated course (Disability and Design) brings students with diverse abilities together to identify and respond to a range of design opportunities. Within this context, we view the disconnect between the user expectations and the user experience as a design opportunity, where a design intervention can resolve/solve a negative user experience.