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Organizing metaphors for design methods

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Abstract

Design students must develop competence in a wide range of areas in order to be successful in their future practice. Increasingly, knowledge of design methods is used to frame both a designer’s repertoire and their overall facility as a designer. However, there is little research on how students build cognitive schema in relation to design methods or how these schema relate to specific patterns of engagement as developing designers. In this paper, we report a multiple case study, capturing the experiences of four advanced undergraduate students enrolled in a User Experience (UX) design program at a large research-intensive institution. Through reflexive thematic analysis on our interview study outcomes, we describe the wide variety of metaphors that these students used to organize and frame their understanding of design methods, including both principles they used to consider methods as knowledge, and the ways in which they felt these organizing principles impacted their practice of design. We conclude with recommendations for further research on the uptake of methods-focused competence in design education and practice.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 1909714.

Funding

This research project was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Anne C. Pivonka, Laura Makary & Colin M. Gray

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Colin M. Gray

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  1. Anne C. Pivonka
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  2. Laura Makary
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  3. Colin M. Gray
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Correspondence to Colin M. Gray.

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Pivonka, A.C., Makary, L. & Gray, C.M. Organizing metaphors for design methods. Int J Technol Des Educ 34, 1859–1877 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-024-09880-y

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