Research about design cognition acknowledges the importance of knowledge about exiting solutions. Designers tend to employ solution oriented thinking strategies; they generate idea’s starting from initial solutions - called primary generators; they are known to rely on episodic knowledge and precedent throughout the design process; and they iterate frequently between the problem and solution space . This raises the question how such solutions, often in the form of existing designs are taught. Few design programs explicitly acknowledge existing solutions as part of the designers knowledge base, or specify, for example, what types of analyses designers should be able to perform on them. We believe design education could benefit from rethinking how their curricula handle solutions and from explicating this role. To this end we introduce the notion of ‘solution repertoire’. With this term we refer to the knowledge designers have of existing solutions. An analysis of the notion of solution repertoire helps us to identify and recognize solution oriented knowledge and its treatment in our schools. This, in turn, helps us to make more informed choices in our curriculum development.
DOCUMENT
Design education has a nuanced relationship with examples. Although they are considered useful teaching tools, their use is often restricted to illustrating the design theories and principles around which the curriculum is structured. In contrast, professional designers view examples as autonomous entities and use them to initiate a critical dialogue with their current problem space. Therefore, students should be facilitated in cultivating their own repertoire of solutions and learn to initiate conversations between existing solutions and design challenges to gain a better understanding of the problem space and generate new designs. This paper outlines a small-scale experiment conducted with master's students in Applied Data Science at Utrecht University who took a course on designing recommender system interfaces. The students were provided with a set of examples of recommender interface designs as their main instructional tool. They could use this set to curate their own solution repertoire. As a result, the majority of the participants' work displayed more diverse designs, and they used design patterns distilled from those examples generatively, developing innovative designs. Based on this case study, we tentatively conclude that a design curriculum built around examples, complemented by theories, could be advantageous, as long as special attention is given to helping students initiate fruitful iterations between their challenges and a set of solutions.
LINK
Introduction of the special issue ‘Exploring the multilingual family repertoire: ethnographic approaches'.
LINK
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York Video is increasingly used as an instructional tool. It is therefore becoming more important to improve learning of students from video. We investigated whether student learning effects are influenced through an instruction about other viewing behaviours, and whether these learning effects depend on their prior knowledge. In a controlled environment, 115 students watched a number of instructional videos about the technical equipment needed in a course on digital photography. Every second student was instructed about other possible viewing behaviours. A pre-post-retention test was carried out to calculate learning effects. The differences with respect to the learning effects of students who received an awareness instruction on an alternative viewing strategy were not significantly different. The differences as observed in our earlier experiment however could not be reproduced. Students with a broad viewing repertoire showed higher learning effects than students with a narrow repertoire. Furthermore, students with a strategic viewing approach also showed higher learning effects. Certain conditions have to be met: the technical and didactical quality of the video must be good, the integration in a learning task must be apparent, students must be aware of their viewing behaviour, and teachers must be aware of their students’ viewing behaviour in order to enrich the viewing repertoire of students when they have at least some basic knowledge e.g. after several lessons on the topics at hand. In future research, this study should be replicated using more complex video episodes than the instruction videos we used in our experiments that were only on the factual knowledge level of the taxonomy of Bloom. Moreover, replication of this study with a larger sample size could yield a significant improvement in learning effects. This is plausible because students need an amount of prior knowledge beyond a certain threshold value in order to be able to expand their knowledge network in their long term memory. Finally, additional media player functionality, facilitating effective student learning from video, can be described based on the results of this study.
LINK
The promotor was Prof. Erik Jan Hultink and copromotors Dr Ellis van den Hende en Dr R. van der Lugt. The title of this dissertation is Armchair travelling the innovation journey. ‘Armchair travelling’ is an expression for travelling to another place, in the comfort of one’s own place. ‘The innovation journey’ is the metaphor Van de Ven and colleagues (1999) have used for travelling the uncharted river of innovation, the highly unpredictable and uncontrollable process of innovation. This research study began with a brief remark from an innovation project leader who sighed after a long and rough journey: ‘had I known this ahead of time…’. From wondering ‘what could he have known ahead of time?’ the immediate question arose: how do such innovation journeys develop? How do other innovation project leaders lead the innovation journey? And could I find examples of studies about these experiences from an innovation project leader’s perspective that could have helped the sighing innovation project leader to have known at least some of the challenges ahead of time? This dissertation is the result of that quest, as we do know relatively little how this process of the innovation project leader unfolds over time. The aim of this study is to increase our understanding of how innovation project leaders lead their innovation journeys over time, and to capture those experiences that could be a source for others to learn from and to be better prepared. This research project takes a process approach. Such an approach is different from a variance study. Process thinking takes into account how and why things – people, organizations, strategies, environments – change, act and evolve over time, expressed by Andrew Pettigrew (1992, p.10) as catching “reality in flight”.
MULTIFILE
Survivors of father–daughter incest often suffer from complex trauma and sensory insensitivity, making it difficult to decipher the sensations in the body and experience body ownership, self-location and agency. This case study illustrates how sensory focused, Trauma-Centred Developmental Transformations can help restore or develop a bodily self, desensitize fear-based schemas, revise deeply buried beliefs and extend repertoire.
DOCUMENT
Mentor teachers need a versatile supervisory skills repertoire. Besides taking the prevalent role of daily advisor and instructor, mentor teachers should also be able to stimulate reflection in student teachers. Video recordings were analyzed of 60 mentoring dialogues, both before and after a mentor teacher training aiming at developing the encourager role. Mentor teachers' repertoires of supervisory skills were found to consist of an average of seven supervisory skills. After training, a shift was observed in the frequencies and duration with which supervisory skills were used. Although considerable inter-individual variability existed between mentor teachers, training positively affected the use of supervisory skills for stimulating reflection in student teachers.
DOCUMENT
This article explores how junior design professionals cope with value-based conflicts. We interviewed 22 design professionals about past and current value-based conflicts and the coping strategies adopted. Applying a grounded theory approach, we identified 11 types of coping strategies employed by junior design professionals. Our findings allowed us to clarify the nature of the coping process and localise value-based conflicts in the process of collaborative practice. During the coping process, professionals learn how to handle value-based conflicts through emotional release, developing a broader action repertoire, and engaging in timely action. We also identified transitions between specific coping strategies as junior designers learned from past conflicts and developed as a professional.
MULTIFILE
The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences and impact of peer-to-peer shadowing as a technique to develop nurse middle managers’ clinical leadership practices. A qualitative descriptive study was conducted to gain insight into the experiences of nurse middle managers using semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed into codes using constant comparison and similar codes were grouped under sub-themes and then into four broader themes. Peer-to-peer shadowing facilitates collective reflection-in-action and enhances an “investigate stance” while acting. Nurse middle managers begin to curb the caring disposition that unreflectively urges them to act, to answer the call for help in the here and now, focus on ad hoc “doings”, and make quick judgements. Seeing a shadowee act produces, via a process of social comparison, a behavioural repertoire of postponing reactions and refraining from judging. Balancing the act of stepping in and doing something or just observing as well as giving or withholding feedback are important practices that are difficult to develop.
DOCUMENT
