Background: Because of prior experience solving well-structured problems that have single, correct answers, students often struggle to direct their own design work and may not understand the need to frame ill-structured design problems.
Purpose: Framing agency—defined as making decisions that are consequential to framing design problems and learning through this process—sheds light on students’ treatment of design problems; by framing, we mean the various actions designers take to understand, define, and bound the problem. Using the construct framing agency, we sought to characterize design team discourse to detect whether students treated design problems as ill- or well-structured and examine the consequences of this treatment.
Method: Data were collected through extended participant observation of a capstone design course in a biomedical engineering program at a large research university. Data included audio and video records of design team meetings over the course of framing and solving industry-sponsored problems. For this paper, we analyzed three cases using sociolinguistic content analysis to characterize framing agency and compared the cases to illuminate the nuances of framing agency.
Results: All teams faced impasses; one team navigated the impasse by framing the problem, whereas the others treated the problem as given. We identified markers of agency in students’ discourse, including tentative language, personal pronouns, and sharing ownership.
Conclusions: Framing agency clarifies the kinds of learning experiences students need in order to overcome past experiences dominated by solving archetypical well-structured problems with predetermined solutions.
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This content will become publicly available on February 14, 2025
Entangled Co-Design with a Trickster: Speculative Framing and Reframing
Speculative design, as a diverse set of methods that aim to offer critique, can be challenging to engage productively. In this design case, we share how a prior, stalled design project—an ambitious vision of interdisciplinary design education partnered with business and housing development projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico—provided compelling precedent as we sought to reframe during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recognized that solution-focused ways of working in the prior project left the design problem undefined. As we began the design work detailed in this case, we leveraged the perspectives and design knowledge of our interdisciplinary team of faculty and students. While design cases often emphasize the designed training or program, we focus on our reframing process, sharing vignettes as we prepared to and participated in activities at a design workshop, and then used our own design practices to engage in problem framing workshops. In sharing these accounts, we characterize the pandemic as a trickster and speculative co-designer, who revealed much about how our efforts were entangled with institutional structures. Across these punctuated vignettes of design work, we highlight how an initial broad problem frame invited this trickster to participate and how the application of problem framing tools wrested framing agency from the trickster. Collectively, this anchored our attention to systemic inequities in ways that troubled notions of sustainability.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1751369
- PAR ID:
- 10495184
- Publisher / Repository:
- IUScholarWorks Journals
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Designs for Learning
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2159-449X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 131 to 144
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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