Visualizing the design process–an educational approach for the synthesis of design diaries

Paper in proceeding, 2013

There have been a lot of efforts in the research community for describing the design process and visualizing it in general roadmaps. But when it comes to designers, they have difficulties in explaining how they work and what they do. Since designers draw upon their personal experiences, through time they develop a more or less individual process. The ability to explain and reflect on the design process will not only facilitate self-evaluation for the designers, but also would assist them in communicating with other stakeholders in the product development process. While there are various educational approaches for teaching different design skills, design literature has not provided many examples of approaches for familiarizing the design students with reflecting on, and communicating their individual processes. This article reports on such an approach, which aimed to provide the design students with the ability to communicate their design process through documenting self-reflective comments in form generation diaries and synthesizing their self-reflections by visualizing their process.