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Student Reflections on Needs Finding in Community-Based Design Work

Part of: Design Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Robert P. Loweth ,
Shanna R. Daly ,
Kathleen H. Sienko  and
Jiangqiong Liu

Abstract

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Reflection is an important component in design skill development that helps designers better understand their design problem, develop better solutions, and improve their design approaches. This study explored the information that a student design team reflected on as part of a needs finding experience and the outcomes from these reflections. During the needs finding experience, the team exhibited reflection-in- action behavior as they used available data to form and iterate on explanatory hypotheses about potential community needs. After the needs finding experience, the team exhibited reflection-on-action behavior as they drew connections between their interview approaches and stakeholder responses and discussed changes they might make in the future. The team also identified situations where contextual factors of the stakeholder impacted their interviews, but during these reflections did not indicate how they might adapt their approaches to account for such factors in the future. These findings show that student designers can use reflection as a tool to improve their needs finding process but would benefit from pedagogical structures that might help them reflect more effectively.

Keywords

Reflective practiceNeeds findingCollaborative designDecision makingDesign education
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 569 - 578
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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