Design Studies : Vol 43 March 2016

Interventions for teaching sketching skills and reducing inhibition for novice engineering designers Joran W. Booth This paper explores improving sketching skills and reducing the inhibition to sketch for student designers. In the first study, students were taught sketching skills through an in-class workshop. The effect was evaluated using a pre-mid-post test (n = 40). In the second study, students were led through art activities to reduce their inhibition to sketch. The effect was tested using another pre-mid-post test (n = 26). The first study found sketching skills increased, but declined with disuse. The second study found reduced inhibition immediately after the workshop, an increase after the sketch skills workshop, and a decrease over the semester. This suggests that sketch training and inhibition-reducing exercises are effective in the short term, but must be emphasized over time for a permanent change. Assessing methods for effect-driven design: Evaluation of a social design method Nynke Tromp The study reported in this paper describes the evaluation of the Social Implication Design (SID) method. This effect-driven design method aims to support designers in designing the influence of design manifestations on behaviour in order to counteract social issues. To study the effectiveness of the method, both a multiple-case study with designers and a narrative-based study with social experts have been executed. Based on our findings we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the method, and suggest improvements. We conclude this paper by reflecting on our approach as research methodology for assessing effect-driven design methods and argue that qualitative studies, prior to validating design methods quantitatively, will increase the significance of design methodology for design practice. Measuring and comparing novelty for design solutions generated by young children through different design methods Wouter Sluis-Thiescheffer When involving children in the design process, it is important to understand the novelty of their design solutions. This paper reviews the applicability of an often cited novelty metric Shah et al. (2003) for the comparison of two design methods conducted with 8–10 year old children. The novelty metric is applied to data that is different for a number of parameters, such as a different design phase (exploratory instead of conceptual), size and variety. The results yielded by this novelty metric are not straightforward. This paper describes the difficulties encountered and introduces an alternative approach. The alternative approach leads to better results for any amount of data, for an exploratory phase. Additionally the paper explains how this approach increases the sensitivity for detecting differences in novelty when comparing design methods