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Table 1 Informed design patterns (Crismond and Adams 2012 )

From: An exploratory study of informed engineering design behaviors associated with scientific explanations

Beginning vs. informed design patterns

Description

Pattern A.

Beginning designers feel that understanding the design task is straightforward, a matter of comprehending the challenge as a well-structured problem, which they prematurely and immediately attempt to solve. Informed designers seek initially to explore and comprehend the challenge as the best they can, delaying decisions to frame the problem effectively.

Problem solving vs. problem framing

Pattern B.

Beginning designers skip doing research in favor of generating solutions immediately. Informed designers do research to build knowledge broadly about the problem and potential solutions.

Skipping vs. doing research

Pattern C.

Beginning designers can start a design project with very few or even just one idea, which they may not want to discard, add to, or revise. Informed designers want to design with an abundance of ideas and practice idea fluency to explore the design space and initially seek to avoid favoring any single solution.

Idea scarcity vs. idea fluency

Pattern D.

Beginning designers propose and sketch ideas that superficially resemble viable solutions but do not support deep inquiry into how (and if) a solution might function or behave. Informed designers use multiple representations (gestures, words, text, simulations, prototypes) to explore and investigate design ideas in ways that support deep inquiry into how a system works.

Surface vs. deep drawing and modeling

Pattern E.

Beginning designers ignore or pay too little attention to design criteria and constraints, make design decisions without weighing options and trade-offs, or attend only to pros of favored ideas and cons of lesser approaches. Informed designers balance systems of benefits and trade-offs, using words and graphics, when they consider plans or make and justify decisions.

Ignore vs. balance benefits and trade-offs

Pattern F.

Beginning designers run few tests on their design prototypes, and when they run tests, they can confound experiments that cannot provide useful information about potential solutions and their performance. Informed designers conduct valid tests as part of their investigations that help them learn quickly about key variables, materials, users, and ways to optimize performance of prototypes.

Confounded vs. valid tests and experiments

Pattern G.

Beginning designers use unfocused, non-analytical ways to view prototypes during testing and troubleshooting ideas. Informed designers focus their attention on problematic areas and subsystems when troubleshooting devices and proposing ways to fix them.

Unfocused vs. diagnostic troubleshooting

Pattern H.

Beginning designers design in haphazard ways, working at random on whatever problems emerge or they treat design as a set of strategies to be done once in linear order. Informed designers design as an iterative process, improving ideas and prototypes based on feedback and cycling back to upgrade their understanding of the problem, managing time and resources strategically, and using design strategies multiple times as needed, in any order.

Haphazard or linear vs. managed and iterative designing

Pattern I.

Beginning designers do tacit designing when they think and act with little self-reflection and do little monitoring of their own or others’ actions either in the moment or after the work is done. Informed designers practice reflective thinking in a metacognitive way by reviewing and keeping tabs on design strategies and thinking while working and after work is finished.

Tacit vs. reflective design thinking

  1. Note: For full matrix, see Crismond and Adams (2012).