The Importance of Doing rather than Discussing: How Curricular Changes Affected Student Design-task Prioritization in a Hands-on Design Project

摘要

The Global Leadership Program (GLP) is a component of collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). During GLP, a design-based wilderness education class addresses the development of design thinking, engineering science, and leadership skills; it consists of project-based classroom and shop activities on campus, followed by a multiday wilderness expedition. After the 2015 class, students tended to place increased importance on tasks related to immediate action such as building. At the same time, decreased importance was placed on exploratory tasks such as understanding the problem and iterating. The 2016 curriculum was modified with these findings in mind, increasing the time spent discussing exploratory aspects of the design process and increasing the number of opportunities for students to iterate on designs. Spending more time just discussing a specific design task (understanding the problem) was not associated with students continuing to emphasize its importance. However, we found that spending time performing a specific design task (iterating) was associated with students continuing to emphasize its importance.