WIP: Changes in Students' Understanding and Use of Representations During a Design Course

This work in progress (WIP) research paper describes student use of representations in engineering design. While iterative design is not unique to engineering, it is one of the most common methods that engineers use to address socio-technical problems. The use of representations is common across design methodologies. Representations are used in design to serve as external manifestations of internal thought processes that make abstract concepts tangible, enhance communication by providing a common language, enable iteration by serving as a low-effort way to explore ideas, encourage more empathetic design by capturing users' perspectives, visualize the problem space, and promote divergent thinking by providing different ways to visualize ideas. While representations are a key aspect of design, the effective use of representations is a learned process which is affected by other factors in students' education. This study sought to understand how students' perceptions of the role of representations in design changed over the course of a one-semester design course. Small student teams created representations in a three-stage process-problem exploration, convergence to possible solutions, and prototype generation-that captured their evolving understanding of a socio-technical issue and response to it. The authors hypothesize that using effective representations can help develop skills in convergence in undergraduate students; one of engineering's contributions to convergent problem solving is design. More specifically, this research looked at students' use of design representations to develop convergent understanding of ill-defined socio-technical problems. The research questions focus on how students use representations to structure sociotechnical design problems and how argumentation of their chosen solution path changed over time. To answer these questions this study analyzed student artifacts in a third-year design course supported by insights on the process of representation formation obtained from student journals on the design process and a self-reflective electronic portfolio of student work. Based on their prior experiences in engineering science classes, students initially viewed design representations as time-bound (e.g. homework) problems rather than as persistent tools used to build understanding. Over time their use of representations shifted to better capture and share understanding of the larger context in which projects were embedded. The representations themselves became valued reflections on their own level of understanding of complex problems, serving as a self-reflective surface for the status of the larger design problem.