Capturing Design Signatures | Teaching Activities

Design Process Tracing is a collection of activities intended to address the question, “How might we help students become better able to intentionally engage in a design process, as part of an effort to help them become reflective practitioners of design?”

Most often, engineering students learn to apply an engineering design process and focus more on the design deliverables as tasks rather than artifacts of an ongoing process. The collection of these activities thus leverages self-tracking timeline methods (which we are calling “design signatures”), as seen in Figure 1, to make visible the complexity of a design process. Having an in-action visual of a design process supports individuals to reflect on their understanding of design processes and areas of improvement.

The activities range from short in-class activities to multi-semester tracking of capstone design projects. We have collected design signatures using paper-and-pencil bubble sheets, Google forms, spreadsheets, and the newly-developed Design Signatures app. In each implementation, students have had great “aha” moments about the design process and themselves as designers. We are enthusiastic about sharing these inspirational activities with the larger community.Good Designers do “X” is a collection of 179 statements of what “good designers do”, sourced from 34 individuals in the field of design and engineering education.