Designed by Engineers: An analysis of interactionaries with engineering students

• Authors: Henrik Artman , David House , Magnus Hultén
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The aim of this study is to describe and analyze learning taking place in a collaborative design exercise involving engineering students. The students perform a time-constrained, open-ended, complex interaction design task, an “interactionary”. A multimodal learning perspective is used. We have performed detailed analyses of video recordings of the engineering students, including classifying aspects of interaction. Our results show that the engineering students carry out and articulate their design work using a technology-centred approach and focus more on the function of their designs than on aspects of interaction. The engineering students mainly make use of ephemeral communication strategies (gestures and speech) rather than sketching in physical materials. We conclude that the interactionary may be an educational format that can help engineering students learn the messiness of design work. We further identify several constraints to the engineering students’ design learning and propose useful interventions that a teacher could make during an interactionary. We especially emphasize interventions that help engineering students retain aspects of human-centered design throughout the design process. This study partially replicates a previous study which involved interaction design students.

Keywords

EN

design; engineering education; interactionary; interaction design; learning design sequence; multimodal learning

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Designs for Learning
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 28-56

Dates

published

2014-12-01

online

2015-06-03

Contributors

author

Henrik Artman

• KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

author

David House

• KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

author

Magnus Hultén

• Linköping University, Sweden

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/dfl-2014-0062