Reflective activities have the potential to encourage students to develop critical skills and awareness of mental models. In this study, I address the emerging identity of early design students as they externalize their evolving conceptions of design through visual and textual reflection. Forty-three students in an introductory human-computer interaction (HCI) course completed weekly textual reflections on a course blog, and completed visual reflections at the conclusion of each of three projects. The weekly blog reflections were intended to document their experience as a developing designer, while the visual reflections represented their personal conception of design within HCI—their rendering of the “whole game”. Through this process of reflection, students externalized their transformation as designers, including an awareness of the pedagogical, social, and cultural factors shaping them, and a growing sense of their personal and professional design identity. Through interviews and additional analysis of eight of these students, a disjuncture was found between conceptions of design in visual and textual reflections, with visual reflections forming a professional, generic design identity, and textual reflections more congruent with the student’s personal identity. Issues relating to lack of representational skill and how these forms of reflection externalize a student’s evolving design philosophy are addressed.

1. look upon this jurisdiction with renewed jollity. This jargon that threatens to
journey, no mere jolly junket, is justified by our juxtaposition of ambition and
can call me J.
Well now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’m Jared! My journey here
think about it, the more I realized I was destined to become a designer
I was actually born in Bloomington, but haven’t actually lived here for m
here, near the Indiana/Ohio border. After high school, in a rather bizarr
undergrad after falling in love with the campus and the friendly people
freshman, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with course guide in hand and
And that’s when the trouble started.
Fast forward to two semesters later and I’m in the midst of an existentia
Philosophy, Comparative Literature, Political Science, and Psychology. I
realized I had to put aside my tendencies to dabble in just about any p
driven primarily by the solid instruction in that department, and my fas
decisions. I even picked up a minor in Global Culture along the way, an
Wisconsin Experience.
But when the diploma met my hand on graduation day (well, metaphor
victory. I was no doubt proud of my accomplishment, but a part of me f
arrived. And so I did what every graduate from my class of 2009 did; fil
Funny thing about job applications, particularly those for the federal g
not unusual to not hear back for 4-6 months, a fact I only found out lat
political connections, so several interviews later, I found myself at an u
it wasn’t even this job, or the one I took at a polling and research firm
years later, in my last 6 months with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, that it al
My day-to-day duties at the USAO mainly involved supporting a team o
drafting, filing, I did a little bit of everything. But it wasn’t until I got so
VISUAL + TEXTUAL
REFLECTION
Colin M. Gray
Iowa State University
16 JUNE 2014
locating the emerging
design identity of students through

2. grounding this work
❖ Sketching as an expression of design reasoning
(Buxton, 2007; Do & Gross, 1996; Verstijnen, et al., 1998)
❖ A general focus on mechanics of sketching, but not on how
sketching can relate to identity development and
externalizations of one's unique design philosophy
(Nelson & Stolterman, 2012)
❖ Reflection as a tool to externalize how a student is thinking
about design (Gray & Siegel, 2013; Siegel & Stolterman, 2008)

3. Sketching Design Thinking (Gray & Siegel, 2013)

4. CONTEXT

5. (Gray, 2014)

6. DATA

7. DATA

8. Introductory course in interaction design

9. 1 graduate design course
43 students
109 sketches 513 posts

10. Viewing education in a holistic, action-driven way (Perkins, 2010)

11. participants
Name
Country of
Origin
Educational
Background
Sketches
(by project) Posts Comments
Thomas United States Philosophy 3 9 17
Jack United States Journalism 1,2 11 56
Naveen India Engineering 1,2,3 6 12
Isabella Mexico Computer Science 1,2,3 17 29
Parker United States Computer Science 1,2,3 10 7
Mei-Xing China Telecommunications 1,3 16 46
Adrian United States Education 2,3 15 28
Zachary United States Political Science 1,3 17 27

12. participants
Name
Country of
Origin
Educational
Background
Sketches
(by project) Posts Comments
Thomas United States Philosophy 3 9 17
Jack United States Journalism 1,2 11 56
Naveen India Engineering 1,2,3 6 12
Isabella Mexico Computer Science 1,2,3 17 29
Parker United States Computer Science 1,2,3 10 7
Mei-Xing China Telecommunications 1,3 16 46
Adrian United States Education 2,3 15 28
Zachary United States Political Science 1,3 17 27

13. PARKER
computer science
case #1
“the design process seemed
like a flowchart”

14. “I wholly expect everyone to fail miserably
out of the gate and I welcome it”

16. “I had a little breakdown in how I was prioritizing
my life [...] so I was a little distant”

17. NAVEEN
engineering
case #2
!
“[the professor] wants us to feel exhausted and
suffocated by the way ‘we think’ design work is done”

18. “[you] shouldn’t be attached to your design ideas”

19. “[the professor] wants us to feel exhausted
and suffocated by the way ‘we think’
design work is done”

21. ISABELLA
computer science
case #3
“I didn’t thinking how I felt mattered.”

22. “what will design mess up?”

23. “Oh, there will be blood on room 150 by the end”

25. DISCUSSION

26. Disjuncture between visual
and textual reflections1

27. “in design,
people on both sides
leave their mark”
ZACHARY

28. Visual representation in
early design education2

29. Revealing conceptions of
designerly identity3

30. 3
“felt forced—
having to reflect”
THOMAS

31. implications
❖ Affordances of multiple types of reflection should be
considered when constructing design education
experiences
❖ Consideration must be made for incoming skill level, both
in writing and visual/spatial reasoning
❖ Value as a diagnostic tool for professors to see externalized
conceptions of design (but they can be wrong!)
❖ Beyond mechanical sketching or writing ability to what
those abilities tell us about the developing designer

32. thank you
martin a. siegel, erik stolterman,
omar sosa-tzec, jordan beck
nsf grant #1115532