Subject area: Design expertise, design awareness, design process
Activity type: Affinity grouping, Discussion
Activity time: 40 minutes
Creator(s): Cindy Atman
“Good Designers do “X”: Affinity Grouping” is one of three standalone activities created for the Good Designers do “X” collection. Good Designers do “X” is a set of 179 statements responding to the question, “When you talk to someone and say ‘good designers do “x”’, what are the top things you list?” from 34 individuals in the field of design research.
In “Good Designers do “X”: Affinity Grouping”, students will have the opportunity to broadly analyze expert designers’ ideas about what good designers do and reflect on the patterns that they see.
The purpose of this activity is to allow students to interact with the Good Designers do “X” collection of statements to glean insights that may help them in their work. Students have the opportunity to witness a broad set of design process models and design behaviors, and connect this to their personal design work.
This activity can help students:
If you would like this activity done physically:
If you would like this activity done virtually:
Note that the virtual version can be done both in online and in-person settings.
If you are using physical cards:
If you are using a Miro board: (5 minutes preparation)
What struck you as interesting about this activity?
“I left with a lot of authors/resources to look into to learn about design motivations. I found it really interesting about designing with the intent to make the world better equitably and socially, but also understanding that even the smallest moments can have a big impact too.” — Student 4
Encourage students to connect with the collection: Often, we have seen that students can resonate deeply with the quotes when they imagine how it applies to their past work or how they want to apply it to their future work. You can have your students take time to jot down some of their favorite quotes, that way they can look back on them in the future.
Try different groups of participants: The Design Signatures Team has done this activity with individual researchers and with classrooms and research groups of students. The resulting affinity groups are similar and different in interesting ways—for example, among individual researchers we looked at the groupings that overlapped between researchers and the groupings that were unique. If this activity were done in groups of your students rather than across the entire class, these similarities and differences can inspire conversation among your students.