SEEING THE PROCESS: EMPOWERING STUDENTS IN DESIGN AND ENGINEERING THROUGH VISUAL FRAMEWORKS

Design has only recently begun to be acknowledged as a discipline and an academic area of inquiry. It owes this recognition, in part, to the perseverance of a community of scholars in articulating the design process by developing systematic design methodologies. Nevertheless, despite the several amounts of design process representations, we observed a lack of confidence among industrial design students in understanding and applying a structured design methodology when approaching mid-complexity product design projects. Dealing with complexity and making well-founded and justified design decisions often represent a challenge for novice designers. Hence, this paper aims to strengthen the coherence of the educational framework and ensure the learning outcomes of two sequential product design studio courses in the MSc in Design & Engineering program—Product Development Design Studio (PDDS) in the first year and Final Project Work (FPW) in the second year—are achieved. In both courses, the teaching staff experimented with different visualizations of the design process proposed in the course, with the aim of empowering design students by enhancing their awareness of the design process, design decision-making and fostering key competencies to face real-world challenges. This study was conducted during the first semester of the 2024-25 academic year, when the authors, as part of the two different teaching staff, proposed a visual framing of the design process in their course. These visual representations were developed independently for each course and consistently with the proposed project pathway within it.