Design Process Resilience: Awareness as designers in community

Spring 2025 Exhibition - University of Washington, Sieg Hall 4th Floor

In the Iterating on Design Process Resilience Directed Research Group (DRG), students engaged in communities of practice to develop awareness of themselves as designers. This Winter 2025 DRG was a continuation of the Design Process Resilience class offered in Autumn 2024. As a community, students sought to understand the context of their designs and develop resilience to thrive in today’s fast-moving and ambiguous environment. In this exhibit, students collectively showcase their conception of Design Process Resilience through their deep understanding of the foundational concepts of design and resilience.

Students in DRG: Dina K Chawla, Jesse Yu, Nirmmall Kuttapaa, Paige Han, Rupal Patel, Sarah Stumme, Saumik Shashwat, Shay Duan, Xiaoyi Xue, Yit Chung
Teaching team: Cindy Atman, Eileen Zhang
‍Poster design: Xiaoyi Xue, Yit Chung

The Dear Design Spring 2022 exhibition is an interactive installation featuring 40 “Ideal Design Signatures” created by participants across five Dear Design seminars in 2020 and 2022. Individually, each wooden block displays two different students’ ideal design signatures and has two solid blue faces. Collectively, the blocks can be arranged to display a “cascade shape”. This shape was identified through design process expertise research and is an illustration of an expert design process. The intention of the exhibition was to showcase student Dear Design work to our department, Human Centered Design & Engineering, along with other colleagues across the University of Washington campus. The exhibition also served to spark conversation about design processes and design awareness.

For more information: The Exhibit on HCDE Department News
Exhibit design: Grace Barar
Special thanks to Jane Skau, Leah Pistorius and Eileen Zhang