Developing Design Expertise Through the Construction of Video Stories

Making sense of formal design education, confronting the conflicts it raises with design practice, and the on-going process of assimilating design experience is all part of designers’ development. This paper analyses the ways in which theories about experiential learning and expert performance identify 'reflection' as a vital mechanism operating at different levels according to whether experiential learners are responding to a situation as it unfolds, or critically making sense of past events. The work links notions about reflection with the process of story-making via their common agenda of sense-making. The paper demonstrates the experiential learning value of exploiting digital video recording and editing technology to support story-making as part of professional development - through facilitating critical reflection about design practice. It reports an empirical study of small groups of industrial designers in which the potential of video story-making for making sense of design experiences was assessed through two-week long intensive workshops. The workshops, devised to generate the research data, took place during my four-month sabbatical at TU Delft in autumn 2001. The paper considers the separate activities (video-recording design activity, viewing and selecting footage, planning story foci with others, editing and composing a final film) in terms of their contribution to reflection that supports experiential learning. Claims are supported from close analysis of research data comprising comprehensive video recordings of all workshop activity; a unique feature of the research design. The study pioneered the use of video-story making as a means of critically reflecting on the design process in the context of acquiring design expertise. The paper appears in a special issue of Design Studies devoted to Design Expertise. Different aspects of the work were presented in a variety of forums including the Engineering and Product Design Education Conference, Coventry, 2002 and the International Conference of Engineering Design, Stockholm 2003