When tough times make tough designers: how perplexing experiences shape engineers’ knowledge and identity

• Autores: Xiao Ge, Larry Leifer
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 36, no. 2, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Clive L. Dym Mudd Design Workshop XI Design Education and Practice – How Process Matters), págs. 650-663
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this paper, we frame design as a learning process where discomfort abounds, and through the process, engineering designersiteratively reconstruct their knowledge and identity. Design and design thinking require very different kinds of cognition andbehavior than engineering science. How engineers deal with their cognitive and epistemic biases while navigating sociotechnicalcomplexities in design is a research topic that has been extensively investigated. Yet, much focus is on its know-how, leaving theactual experiences of knowledge development an underexplored domain. To reveal the internal experiences of designers, weconducted a longitudinal qualitative psychology study at a one-academic-year-long engineering design innovation course. Based onthe empirical work, we theorize about a psychological phenomenon of designers stretching their mind in discomfort and confusion– perplexity. Each micro-activity of designers’ reshaping of design knowledge and identity is conceptualized as a four-stage ‘‘DeathValley’’ of unlearning and reframing: schema incongruence, cognitive dissonance, pattern recognition, and schema resolution. Weunfold how the emotional, cognitive and motivational components of the process are qualitatively different from other processesthrough which engineers fail to develop design knowledge in schema-incongruent situations. In the end, we discuss the potentialvalue of inducing disturbances for learning, and draw implications for how to better construct engineering students’ learningexperiences.