The concept of a “design signature” is the foundation for this work. Every time someone engages in a design process, formally or informally, a trace of design process activities is generated. We refer to such a trace as a “design signature.” Design signatures vary across types of design projects, with different goals, constraints, and deliverables.
The Design Signatures project is built on research by Cindy Atman and the team at the Center For Engineering Learning & Teaching (CELT) and is composed of five main ideas:
To navigate our website, we encourage you to start at Design Signatures to understand the core concept of design process tracing, and then check out Creating to learn ways to capture design process traces, and Teaching for activities to practice design awareness.
Finally, More includes inspirational and fun materials, like a photo gallery of design process visualizations in daily life!
Meet the educators, learners, and designers behind this work!
