Misconceptions of designing

Abstract

Our experience in designing and teaching a cross-disciplinary freshman design class has led us to believe that students entering design fields (e.g., computer science or engineering) are saddled with naïve or (mis)conceptions about design and design activity. It is our belief that for students to become effective designers, they must be helped to recognize and overcome these misconceptions through appropriate educational interventions. To better understand the nature and substance of these misconceptions, we conducted a descriptive survey study of 290 freshman in a technological institute. Our findings begin to suggest a consistent profile of misconceptions across declared majors that start to explain observations we have made of naïve designers in our freshman design class. This paper reports on those findings.