Teaching Innovative Design Reasoning: How Could CK Theory Help?

It has been a common tenet of the C-K Theory so far to be implemented mostly by engineering practitioners and within the larger firms' engineering environments. The resulting scientific and technical preponderance -or perhaps sometimes dominance -may be amply justified by the daunting amount of knowledge underpinning about any new technology, plus the technological intensity of today's product innovations. However, it should be purposefully reminded that the fundamental purpose of the C-K Theory revolves, if anything, around the art of designing innovation. Hence, why artistic professions too wouldn't be C-K implementers as well?

Universal Journal of Educational Research, 2020

The leading trend in the 21st century is an innovative approach in science, education, and culture, manifested in various spheres of human activity-especially those related to the creative transformation and improvement of the world. Thus, the study of the development and functioning of heuristic thinking of designers, associated with innovative ideas and concepts of material culture, is becoming increasingly relevant. The emergence of such professions as creative state moderator or mental fitness coach has been predicted. The purpose of the study is to identify pedagogical technologies aimed at the formation of innovative thinking necessary for a designer's project activity. Designers should be trained based on innovative projects, brainstorming methods, problem-based tasks, and cases, ensuring that students master the system of values, meanings, and models of innovative creative activity. Only then will design projects launch the process of deliberate change that introduces qualitative changes into the environment. Innovative project thinking is a universal competence of designers, necessary for successful professional activities in the modern world in its various forms and types. Therefore, its formation is one of the most important pedagogical problems of today. A new aspect of the study is the methodological recommendations on the training of designers in innovative thinking, which includes three stages of this process: creating an object, assessing the degree of novelty, and mastering in real life. As practice has shown, students form innovative thinking in the classroom if they comprehend innovative projects from the concept to the specific implementation and assessment of the result.

DS 95: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2019), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. 12th -13th September 2019, 2019

Creativity forms the base for innovation. Thus, facilitating thinking outside of one's expertise and allowing the scope of exploration to build new knowledge becomes the challenge. Creative thinking often results from transferring problem solutions from one industry or domain to another through fusion of knowledge that has not been connected before. In the idea generation process, external sources of information are tapped to exploit multiple resource domains facilitating divergent exploration. While developing solutions, one is only able to notice a limited section of the environment due to constraints of limited cognitive abilities and established thinking patterns [1]. To analyse this, an exploratory study was conducted with undergraduate engineering students and their application of the generative design process in coming up with design solutions for given design tasks. Results demonstrated that divergent & convergent thinking stimulated opportunity identification and solution generation, thus improving the originality and diversity of ideas. Kulogun et al mentions, "To perceive, interpret and communicate the world and the facts differently is an important goal of design education and can only be obtained through creative thinking" [2]. This study aims to identify the generative stage of the creative process and help enable opportunities for creative ideation. The study suggests that design education in non-design disciplines can enhance creative exploration and facilitate innovative problem-solving solutions. The generative framework can further help define pedagogic interventions for teaching design process to large classes of nondesign students.

Journal of Engineering …, 2005

This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning. The capstone course is a U.S. term for design courses typically taken in the senior year. The term cornestone is a recent U.S. coinage for design or project courses taken early (e.g., first year) in the engineering curriculum. It was intended to draw a distinction from and preserve the mataphor of the capstone course. G handle uncertainty; G make decisions; G think as part of a team in a social process; and G think and communicate in the several languages of design.

Global Journal of Arts Education

Over the course of time designers have mastered the skill that can be applied to resolve a wide range of problems through analysis of a hypothesis using different research methods strategically and iterativelyCritical design thinking could be applied as an approach to favour the designers to focus on future requirements of people and see beyond their ideological constrains in design. The purpose of the study is to test: by employing critical design method in design education to help the students learn, analyse and evaluate ideas and concepts in a critical manner. Also, it examines critical design as a method for questioning and improving design thinking among students that synergises perfectly with future design thinkers as well as their potential audience. A critical design workshop is conducted in Pearl Academy, Mumbai by the author to test and develop this way of thinking among design students. The workshop results are analysed under Bloom's taxonomy, which is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives under analysis, synthesis and evaluation. An advantage of critical design, is that the method allows students to temporarily move away from problem solving, focusing on asking questions instead of providing answers .

A number of design researchers with different backgrounds have defined design in various ways. The points more or less common to these definitions include initiation of change, improvement, satisfaction of needs, solution of problems, and invention of new things. Moreover, some design theorists describe design as a goaloriented, decision-making, learning, and knowledge application activity. Hence, by deriving from the definitions of design which were set forth by many design theorists, in this conceptual paper, we argue that the cyclical and reiterative model of the design process which relies on the consideration that the phases of the design process essentially require feedbacks occurring through multiple cycles enables learning. While the designer uses precedent knowledge in order to propose solutions to particular problems which were set at the beginning of the design process, they build up new knowledge as the design progresses.

proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED’09): Design Society, 2009

Product development processes are commonly represented in sequential models covering the necessary stages from planning to product rollout, while processes to take needs into the development activities show other aspects, namely that understanding needs requires, for a product developer, additional skills. In our curricula for engineering design education we apply some aspects of design thinking to bring together (a) business savvy, in terms of understanding people's needs as market opportunities, and (b) product ...

Design Thinking is a human-centred innovation process, with an emphasis on deep understanding of consumers, holistically, integratively, creatively, and awe-inspiring. Design Thinking methods and techniques represents how the theory will be operationalized by following the process steps. These methods and techniques can assist in the project management, especially in the initial phase of inspiration and ideation. Another strategy that can collaborate in project management is agile management, mainly in the execution phase of a project. Agile management prioritizes individuals, interactions between them, customers, appropriate software to operate, and prompt response to changes. Thus, this study aims to propose a model to integrate design thinking and project management methods and techniques and to analyze students' projects and interactions to verify the applicability of these in ergonomic project management. For the development of the method, it was used the design science methodology, in four main steps called: Research Clarification, Descriptive Study I, Prescriptive Study, and Descriptive Study II. From the use of tools and techniques of design thinking in a project management exercise for students of two classes, it was revealed that the tools used facilitated the project development, helping from the search and organization of information until the deadline established for the delivery of the project.

Dialectic Journal, 2019

Design thinking is often praised as a universal tool that can be utilized to address and resolve almost any design problem, even those that are the most complex. Judging by the recent criticism from several key design professionals, design thinking seems ill-suited to confront complex, or so-called 'wicked' problems or to facilitate deep thinking. Design thinking falls short of tackling these problems because it only provides ways to empathize with customers, rendering them passive bystanders in the innovation process. In order to address these shortcomings inherent in design thinking, the following discourse introduces deeper critical thinking skills into design thinking, allowing designers in combination with everyday experts to collectively form a political will and act on it. Borrowing from the critical design debate, the new critical design thinking processes developed in response to the growing need for designers to deploy deeper analytical skills to guide their decision making provides a framework to guide a collective design practice capable of dealing with the complex, multi-faceted nature of current political, economic and social affairs. Rather than sustaining a focus on the development of products and product systems and the means to market them at large scale, designers must now work to shift their practice to create critical meta design tools aimed at solving complex design problems, such as circular design or social design challenges.

International Journal of Engineering Education, 2020

Engineering graduates must know how to frame and solve non-routine problems. While design classes explicitly teach problemframing and solving, it is lacking throughout much of the rest of the engineering curriculum and is often relegated to capstoneclasses at the end of the students’ educational experience. This paper explores problem framing and solving through the lens ofexperiential learning theory. It captures core problem framing and solving approaches from critical, design and systems thinkingand concludes with a table of learning outcomes that might be drawn upon in designing an engineering curriculum that more fullydevelops the problem framing and solving capabilities of its students.