"It's Just a Method!": a pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary design

In the excitement of the cognitive revolution, Simon proposed a way of thinking about design that promised to make it more manageable and cognitive: to think of design as a planning problem [10, 26]. Yet, as Suchman argued long ago [28], planning accounts may be applied to problems that are not at base accomplished by planning. This paper reports on a method that takes Suchman’s criticism to heart and avoids dressing up design methods as more systematic and predictive than they in fact are. This method focuses on the teaching of methods as a means to engage in reflective critique. It is not about any one design method – or even a suite of methods – but the idea of methods as a means to understand what is and what is not under the control of designers. The paper reports an effort at this reframing in a graduate team-based design class. While the paper reports an early investigation in the pedagogical application of the idea, the direction suggests underlying factors that may expl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACMDIS
• Authors: Steve R. Harrison, Maribeth Back, Deborah G. Tatar
• Keywords: ACMDIS 2006, Design, Design Methods, Interactive Systems, Keywords Design Methods