Design and Technology Education: An International Journal

Editorial: The value of collaboration

Kay Stables — 2024-12-17

Book Review Maker Education meets Technology Education - Reflections on Good Practice

Marion Rutland — 2024-12-17

Book Review A Nomadic Pedagogy About Technology: Teaching the Ongoing Process of Becoming Ethnictechnologically Literate (Dakers, 2023)

Matt McLain — 2024-12-17

Book Review Center of Excellence for Technology Education (CETE) Vol. 4: Future Prospects of Technology Education

David Gill — 2024-12-17

George Hicks: A personal appreciation

Richard Kimbell — 2024-12-17

Defining and Evaluating Argumentation Quality in the Context of Design Thinking: Using High School Students’ Design Critiques from Foundational Engineering Courses

Wonki Lee — 2024-12-17

This research investigates students’ argumentation quality in engineering design thinking. We implemented Learning by Evaluating (LbE) using Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ), where students assess pairs of items to determine the superior one. In ACJ, students provided rationales for their critiques, explaining their selections. Fifteen students participated in an LbE exercise before starting their backpack design projects, critically evaluating multiple backpack designs and producing 145 comments. Writing comments required students to discern and justify the superior design, fostering informed judgment and articulation of their reasoning. The study used the Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning (CER) framework, adapted for engineering design thinking, to analyse these critiques. The framework emphasized three aspects: Empathy (understanding user needs), Ideation (deriving design inspiration), and Insight (gaining valuable understanding from evaluated designs). We employed both deductive and inductive content analysis to evaluate the argumentation quality in students’ critiques. High-quality argumentation was identified based on six codes: user-focused empathy, design inspirations, logical rationalizations, multi-criteria evaluations, aesthetic considerations, and cultural awareness. Poor-quality argumentation lacked these elements and was characterized by vagueness, uncertainty, brevity, inappropriateness, irrelevance, gender bias, and cultural stereotyping. By identifying critical elements of effective argumentation and common challenges students may face, this study aims to enhance argumentation skills in engineering design thinking at the secondary education level. These insights are intended to help educators prepare students for insightful and successful argumentation in engineering design projects.

Engaging ethnography in the human-centered design technology classroom

Sarah Renkert — 2024-12-17

In design technology education, educators value student outcomes centered on concrete design ideas and a comprehensive understanding of prototyping. However, technology education must consider not only the general technology design process and quality but also human-technology interactions. Inevitably, designs for people are enmeshed in complex sociocultural contexts, inseparable from human needs, values, and desires. Given this need to comprehensively understand the user experience in design technology, ethnographic techniques are increasingly being used to holistically understand people, with the goal of improving their lives through human-centered design. To train design technology students in ethnography, this paper considers one model for teaching human-centered design, using ethnographic methods. Designing Technology for People, an undergraduate-level course offered at Purdue University, is co-taught by faculty from the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation. Throughout the course, students gain experience conducting basic ethnographic research and analysis, in addition to developing a virtual engineer’s notebook and a design mock-up, shaped by their ethnographic findings. This paper turns to one case study, “The Squirrel Squad,” to ethnographically review how the course is taught and the value of co-teaching courses with specialists in both ethnography and design technology.

Virtual Reality as a Supportive Tool for Design Education

Somik Ghosh — 2024-12-17

Immersive technologies have gained attention in design pedagogy due to their potential as effective tools for teaching and learning. Virtual reality (VR) has been extensively explored in the design discipline for tasks such as interpretation, visualization, and collaboration. However, most applications of VR have focused on replacing traditional teaching content but there is a lack of research on using VR as a supportive teaching tool. This study evaluated the effectiveness of VR as a supportive educational tool in design education. Employing a one-group pretest-posttest experimental design, the study assessed the impact of VR on learning technical and spatial knowledge among 60 sophomore students enrolled in the College of Architecture. The results showed significantly higher posttest scores following the utilization of VR content as a supportive tool supplementing traditional teaching content. This study also gathered participants’ perceptions of using VR. The participants rated the quality of the VR content and the ease of use positively, while a few participants reported discomfort related to eye strain.

Development and Evaluation of a Novel Technological Product Development Tool for Education and Industry

Jack Frank Rutherford — 2024-12-17

Few digital product development tools are used in industry and academia compared to their historic paper-based counterparts. This is surprising as many parts of the product development process have digitised such as communication and Computer-Aided Design. Therefore, a gap in knowledge was identified which informed the development of a novel digital product development tool which allows users to undergo the 6-3-5 ideation process to generate concepts. The digital product development tool was tested with participants to gather insights and feedback. The experiment involved focus groups using the digital product development tool alongside the paper-based equivalent to generate concepts and compare both methods. Participants were then asked to complete a survey to receive feedback on the tool. The results indicated that two-thirds of the respondents favoured the digital product development tool compared to its paper-based counterpart. This preference was influenced by the application's capability to store and export concepts, as well as its potential for enhancing learning. Moreover, the digital environment allows for easy storage and reuse of concepts post generation activity, increasing the efficiency of the design process. Additional, lessons learnt for future digital tool development has been highlighted. The use of this tool has promise to support a greater efficiency of design process and ease of learning about the tool and method.