Resumen de Tracing stories across the design process: a study of engineering students’ engagement with storytelling in an undergraduate human-centered design course
Vivek Rao, George Moore, Osita Anders Udekwu, Björn Hartmann
Stories help design teams develop shared understanding and vocabulary throughout the process of developing solutions andprototypes. While stories are widely acknowledged to be essential to the design process, their use by novice designers in universitysettings remains relatively unstudied. In this work, we examine the story practices of undergraduate engineering students enrolled ina one-semester human-centered design project-based course. We develop a coding framework grounded in narrative theory toquantitatively describe the presence of story and its constituent elements in student work. We also integrate three simpleinterventions in the course to facilitate students’ use of stories. After examining assignments (n= 162) spanning six iterations of thehuman-centered design process, we find that students show marked increases in their use of stories in the context of theirprototypes. We also find limited improvement, or in many cases, a decline, in students’ use of stories in the observational andframeworks stages of the process. These findings suggest a relationship between design project iteration and novice designers’ use ofstory, building on previous research relating professional designers’ differing use of story across design phase. This work invitesseveral opportunities for design educators to incorporate facilitation of storytelling practices into their design courses.
