Cognitive Activity‐Based Design Methodology for Novice Visual Communication Designers

The notion of design thinking is becoming more concrete nowadays, as design researchers and practitioners study the thinking processes involved in design and employ the concept of design thinking to foster better solutions to complex and ill‐defined problems. The goal of the present research is to develop a cognitive activity‐based design methodology for novice visual communication designers, which will be achieved by mapping the findings from a comparative analysis of novice and expert visual communication designers' thinking processes onto the prospective methodology. Under the proposed methodology, activity modes take place in a chronological flow under specific guidelines involving various forms of design cognition. The guidelines correlate to design phases from problem structuring to detailed design and to the cognitive processes of divergent and convergent thinking. The methodology gives open‐ended instruction to novices endeavouring to proceed with the design process, solve complex design problems and make better design decisions. This research has value for its unique approach to methodology development. Furthermore, the proposed methodology provides guidance for more effective cognitive activities during the design process and holds potential for implementation in design education due to its focus on the needs of novice designers.     

A Problem‐based Learning Model for Teaching the Instructional Design Business Acquisition Process

There is a growing emphasis on utilizing a problem‐based learning [PBL] pedagogy to help instructional design students gain an understanding of the complex forces operating within an actual design environment. However, little literature exists to suggest that PBL is being used to teach the process by which instructional design firms and practitioners secure work—the Instructional Design Business Acquisition Process (IDBAP). This study outlines a conceptual framework for using an adapted problem‐based learning model for teaching the IDBAP, which consists of writing a response to a request for proposal (RFP), developing a working prototype, and orally presenting the solution. This study also examines the impact of a PBL pedagogy on students' perception of their confidence in solving instructional design problems. The results of this empirical research indicate that students who participate in a problem‐based learning pedagogy gain confidence in their abilities to solve instructional design problems, view themselves in emotional control when solving an instructional design problem, and are more inclined to approach similar problems in the future.     

Examining Instructional Design Principles Applied by Experienced Designers in Practice

There has been ongoing debate regarding the efficacy of teaching instructional design models to novice designers given that experienced instructional designers often use principles and adapted models when they engage in the instructional design problem‐solving process. This study utilized the Delphi technique to identify a core set of guiding principles used by designers in their practice. The purpose of this study was (1) to examine and describe the principles that guided instructional designers’ practice and (2) to identify the extent to which participants’ frames of reference included components of the ADDIE instructional design model. Sixty‐one principles were ultimately identified (reached consensus among the Delphi panel members). Thirty‐two of the principles aligned with the primary components of the design process (e.g., analysis, design, development, and evaluation). Additional principles (n = 29) related to other characteristics of design such as communication, project management, and design characteristics.     

Ethical Challenges for Student Design Projects in Health Care Settings in New Zealand

Student‐led design projects undertaken within healthcare settings raise considerable ethical challenges, primarily resulting from collaboration with service users. This article emerged out of the experiences of design from a New Zealand university undertaking real world projects in acute health care contexts. A human‐centred approach to design is underpinned by a requirement for students to immerse themselves in the user context to optimise design outcomes. Several issues exist in relation to the management of the ethical complexities arising from these projects. Multiple formal ethical review processes were triggered when students’ projects were defined as research. These processes were perceived as onerous and disproportionate to the scale of the projects, and students were ill equipped to identify ethical issues and engage with formal review processes. This resulted in either abandoned projects or the use of compromised methods. A review of codes of practice and design industry approaches identifies a gap in guidance for both students and qualified designers. Some designers describe their projects as service improvement, and not subject to formal ethical review. This article argues for embedding consideration of ethics in all design projects to enhance the process, to be true to the underpinning philosophy of human centred design and to produce ethically aware graduates. To achieve this, a multi‐pronged pedagogical approach which encompasses both hypothetical, class‐based and real‐world learning experiences is described, with the ultimate goal of normalising the consideration and development of ethical standards for students and best practice across the industry.     

Experiential Learning through Community Co‐design in Interior Design Pedagogy

The profit‐driven tendency of interior design trends and styles today has developed in line with the decrease of social awareness in design. The majority of interior design students also decide to pursue interior design education for its marketable and profitable purposes rather than seeing interior design as a field of opportunity to contribute to the social welfare of their communities. Hence, the objective of this research is to implement community service through co‐design in interior design pedagogy. The article describes the learning and design methods used based on human‐centred design approaches of co‐design and analyses the resulting benefits from this approach. Findings reveal that the process of collective creativity and collaborative development with the community enables a direct experience of learning and fosters a deeper connection and understanding of users. They also promote novel multidisciplinary design innovations, accommodate the community's potentials in the society and stimulate a reflexive impact, allowing students to reflect on their future role as interior designers in bringing positive changes to their community against the profit‐driven tendency of contemporary designers today.     

An integrative framework for studying,designing and conceptualising interactivity in children's digital books

In the past five years, there have been significant changes concerning the material and design properties of digital books, with an impact on children's enjoyment and learning from reading on screen. Despite the rapid advances in technology, research on children's digital books is disjointed. This is because of no consistent approach to the study of interactivity, an under‐theorised relationship between print and digital books, and a binary design focused on either learning or playful engagement with digital books. Drawing on the discourse reminiscent of digital game designers, some developers, scholars and professionals celebrate interactivity in digital books as a possibility to motivate and engage children in reading, while a body of experimental research documents the negative impact of interactivity on children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning. This paper presents an integrative framework based on a comprehensive literature review and a content review of the hundred most popular children's digital interactive books. The framework offers: (1) methodological guidance and a definition of interactivity based on five key categories; (2) theoretical guidance based on the third‐space theory; and (3) innovative design and evaluation models based on a ‘method assemblage’. As such, the integrative framework provides new tools and perspectives to advance the field of children's digital books.     

Challenges and issues in designing inquiry on the Web

The purpose of this study is to discuss major issues in designing inquiries on the web. Instructional designers face a lot of difficulties and challenges to deal with in the course of designing inquiry experiences for learners in the online environment, a complex and ill‐structured learning environment. Facilitating inquiry or using an inquiry‐based learning approach on the web has both advantages and disadvantages. Instructional designers need to acknowledge the design issues arising in each and every phase of the design process. Utilising appropriate design strategies, instructional designers can provide positive learning experiences for their online learners. For this purpose, three representative cases in the context of teacher professional development were examined and six major issues were identified as follows: (1) seeking a balance between a system‐generated guide and human facilitator, (2) visual representation of the inquiry process, (3) motivating learners with the right question, (4) engaging learners in various learning activities, (5) guiding the inquiry process with various scaffolds, and (6) maximising learning by coordinating resources, tools and the community of inquiry. This study explains each issue in great detail and provides possible guides for instructional designers to handle the issue.     

An Investigation of Development Toward Instructional Design Expertise

This research investigated expertise development among instructional designers by tracking novice designers' unfolding perceptions of instructional design (ID), design‐related self‐perceptions, and other individual differences. It examined development toward ID expertise from multiple aspects: processes, product, and cognition, through a case study approach. Evidence included qualitative data from interviews, design artifacts, and metacognitive essays, along with quantitative data from questionnaires which assessed goals, need for structure, need for cognition, previous design competence, and design self‐efficacy. Findings indicated that it was not one single characteristic, but the interaction of various factors, that most profoundly seem to influence the development of ID expertise. Relevant characteristics included: perceptions about learning, knowledge and ID; individual needs and learning strategies; and background experiences and orientations. Research in this field will help us to better understand the processes that lead to the development of ID expertise, and to develop better approaches to preparing future instructional designers.     

Teaching Instructional Design: An Action Learning Approach

Many theorists and practitioners are calling for more authentically based teaching approaches in the preparation of instructional designers and performance technologists to address the complexity of the field's practice. Although many innovative methods have been incorporated into the study of instructional design and development and human performance technology, including case studies and applied experiences with collaborative groups, among others, the majority of teaching approaches are limited to the time constraints and format of the traditional university classroom setting. This paper discusses an alternative teaching approach that incorporates action learning principles along with authentic project‐based methods into the full‐time study of instructional design. The paper reviews action learning principles and highlights the commonalties between these principles and the application of the practice and teaching of the instructional design process in an authentic manner. Finally, the implementation of action learning principles within a graduate program in instructional technology is described. Action learning principles may be applied to many content areas; however, the highly complementary nature of this specific methodology to the teaching and practice of instructional design may have the potential to improve greatly our preparation of professionals in the complex work environments characteristic of this and related disciplines. As a valuable component of performance technology skills, training in instructional design methods based on an action learning approach may have broad implications for both the preparation of instructional designers and performance technologists.     

Developing Design through a Creative Problem‐Solving Process: A Group Community Art Project

For the past few years, creativity has gradually become an important element in the national cultivation of talent in Taiwan. Although traditionally art education is closely linked with creativity, the academic research on general art education is very insufficient. Therefore, the goal of this research is to investigate how creativity could be cultivated in curriculum planning for general art education at technology universities as well as what students’ learning process was when they participated in a course's creative activity. The research applied the theory and steps of creative problem‐solving (CPS) on a general art course to design a group practical activity combining with the local community. This involved converting the steps of creative problem‐solving into different stages of group design activities with the goal of constructing a design process equivalent to the process of problem‐solving. The main research results revealed that students could experience the problem‐solving process through group design activities and develop their divergent and convergent thinking at the same time. Moreover, the cooperative learning model is the most appropriate teaching strategy for students from non‐art‐related departments when cultivating their creativity.     

Making Design Education (Even More) Complex: Exploring Complexity for an Amplified Mindset of Design

An Amplified Mindset of Design (AMD) has emerged from recent research on emerging design practices, as designers are once again re‐inventing their identity to include an adaptability to uncertainty and paradox. However, this is not yet visible in what design education offers. As designers intervene in complex contexts and embrace participatory, collaborative and interdisciplinary practices informed by strong ethical and sustainability concerns, design education must adjust and expand its scope to include, for example, collaboration, cross‐cultural and interdisciplinary skills, and a way of being in the world through design. In this article, I argue for the formal introduction and exploration of social complexity in design education to assist the development of an AMD in design students. Boundaries, dependence on context, edge of chaos, emergence and organisation were identified as key qualities of complex systems to introduce to students. Embodiment and visualisation techniques were used as the most appropriate vehicles for such an endeavour. In this article, I discuss the results of a qualitative research informed by action research in which I explore ways of teaching complexity to design students. The inquiry was driven by the following core research question: How can complexity can be taught in design education using visual and embodiment methods to encourage the development of an Amplified Mindset of Design?     

Fragmentation and Interrogation as an Approach to Integration

This article tracks the generative role of research and fragmentation as a means for integrating technology and form within an architecture technology lecture class and a co‐requisite design studio. The complexity of teaching building systems integration within a design studio context is achieved by removing any expectation of building design completion on a comprehensive scale. Typically, in a comprehensive studio, students will design an entire building at a general scale, but at the expense of detailed technical design. However, with use of building fragments, students will design a building corner or a structural bay in great detail while leaving the rest of the building less developed. With our approach, integration occurs through interrogation of case‐study buildings and student projects in the technical course which is complemented by a series of fragmental design studies in the studio. We propose that designing fragments encourages constructive thinking at multiple scales rather than design as a singular problem solving process. As a result, design is not seen as the creation of objects, but as the guidance of multiple, simultaneously acting forces into an integrated assembly. The co‐requisite technical course also embraces fragmentation for research purposes: three professors provide three different technical (structures, environment and construction) and conceptual viewpoints for three distinct building pairs. Various forces within those building pairs are compared to illuminate strategic thinking for comprehensive building design. The intense focus on selective technical systems within these building pairs is intended to support the same development of integrative strategic thinking in the studio.     

How Expert Designers Design

Two studies were carried out with expert educational designers at Arthur Andersen and the Open University of the Netherlands to determine the priorities they employed when designing competence‐based learning environments. Designers in a university context and in a business context agree almost completely on what principles are important, the most important being that one should start a design enterprise from the needs of the learners, instead of the content structure of the learning do main. The main difference between the two groups is that university designers find it extremely important to consider alternative solutions during the whole design process; something that is considerably less important by business designers. University designers also tend to focus on the project plan and the desired characteristics of the instructional blueprint whereas business designers were much more client‐oriented and stressed the importance of “buying in” the client early in the process.     

A Best Practice Modular Design of a Hybrid Course Delivery Structure for an Executive Education Program

This article highlights a best practice approach that showcases the highly successful deployment of a hybrid course delivery structure for an Operations core course in an Executive MBA Program. A key design element of the approach was the modular design of both the course itself and the learning materials. While other hybrid deployments may stress the importance of modular design, our deployment demonstrates how content can be easily mixed and matched into shorter courses on select topics. In particular, through the migration of select content online and the use of face‐to‐face class time for discussion and active‐learning experiences, we were able to dramatically reduce face‐to‐face student seat time, positively increase the student experience, and facilitate dramatic improvement in student academic achievement.     

Non‐mathematical problem solving in organic chemistry

Differences in problem‐solving ability among organic chemistry graduate students and faculty were studied within the domain of problems that involved the determination of the structure of a molecule from the molecular formula of the compound and a combination of IR and ¹H NMR spectra. The participants' performance on these tasks was compared across variables that included amount of research experience, year of graduate study, and level of problem‐solving confidence. Thirteen of the 15 participants could be classified as either “more successful” or “less successful.” The participants in this study who were “more successful” adopted consistent approaches to solving the problems; were more likely to draw molecular fragments obtained during intermediate stages in the problem‐solving process; were better at mining the spectral data; and were more likely to check their final answer against the spectra upon which the answer was based. Experience from research, teaching, and course work were found to be important factors influencing the level of participants' success. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:643–660, 2010     

A critical appraisal of four approaches which support teachers’ problem‐solving within educational settings

This paper critically appraises four problem‐solving approaches, based on a range of theoretical perspectives and procedures, which are currently used in educational settings to support adults to find solutions to complex problems that arise within classrooms and the wider school community. The four approaches are: Circles of Adults; Teacher Coaching; Collaborative Problem‐solving Groups; the Staff Sharing Scheme. The principle aim of all of these interventions is to enable school staff to generate solutions to problems so that children and young people who are causing concern are perceived in ways which lead to more constructive actions and outcomes. A second aim is to build the capacity of those working in schools by developing their skills and self confidence as problem‐solvers and decision‐makers; the assumption being that they will be more able to solve similar problems in the future largely on their own, without the need for extensive external support. The paper then considers the relative strengths and limitations of each approach in relation to practice.     

The use of self,peer and teacher assessment as a feedback system in a learning environment aimed at fostering skills of cooperation in an entrepreneurial context

Education is criticized for producing inert knowledge and for paying too little attention to skills such as cooperating and problem solving. Powerful learning environments have the potential to overcome these educational shortcomings. The goal of this research was to find out ways in which a ‘learning enterprise’ can best be supported (coached) in order to constitute a powerful learning environment aimed at teaching certain cooperative skills in a business context. This ‘learning enterprise’ constitutes an entrepreneurial context in which students in secondary or higher education are working together to conceptualize and eventually commercialize a product. In this research, the impact of different ways of supporting a learning enterprise will be compared. These ways are based on existing guiding principles for the design of powerful learning environments and on a further elaboration of these principles in what is conceptualized as an ‘equilibrium model’. In this model, the balances that are needed between motivating students, activating them towards self‐regulated learning, coaching, structuring and steering the learning processes have been elaborated. Based on this model a differentiation between a ‘student‐controlled’, a ‘teacher‐controlled and a ‘coached approach’, as an equilibrated way between the various approaches to coaching a learning enterprise, has been worked out. We hypothesize that the coached approach will give the best learning results in relation to cooperative skills. A combination of self, peer and teacher assessment of these skills, and an adequate feedback‐strategy based on these assessments, should be an important part of approaches used. These approaches were put into practice in a design experiment, and the impact was compared by means of a pre‐test/post‐test design. Results confirmed the postulated hypotheses that there will need to be a balance between, on the one hand giving students enough freedom for self‐discovery and self‐regulation, and on the other hand steering the students in such a way that certain problems can be avoided and that every student can get optimal learning chances. An adequate assessment‐strategy is needed to search for this balance. Further, a systematic action research of the design experiences resulted in more information on how best to coach a learning enterprise. This information has been summarized in the form of general guidelines.