A Tale of Two Design Contexts: Quantitative and Qualitative Explorations of Student-Instructor Interactions Amidst Ambiguity

Designers develop design skills and knowledge through experience and feedback – feedback from colleagues, clients, supervisors, users, stakeholders, the success or failure of a solution, and design educators. In this project, we focus on the feedback provided to mechanical engineering students completing their undergraduate studies and industrial design graduate students during design reviews. The design coaches (educators and industry clients) and design students must negotiate ambiguity in the process. The students must reduce ambiguity in the sense of providing clear details as they communicate their design work, reduce ambiguity in the coaches’ perceptions of the design work quality by providing evidence and rationales for their design approaches. However, they also maintain ambiguity in the sense of not converging on an idea too quickly in the design process, but instead considering many possibilities. We investigate the different forms of feedback provided by coaches, students’ responses to the feedback, and the ways the students and coaches navigate ambiguity. Finally, we characterize differences between the two environments in terms of the types of feedback given and students’ responses to the feedback