Your Design Journey: A Learning Dashboard for Design Thinking

Abstract

All teachers faced challenges adapting to teaching during the pandemic. This research was motivated by challenges specific to mentoring students working in teams on design projects for the first time. Using Design Thinking (DT) to design a virtual environment for teaching DT, we conducted a series of interviews and focus groups with our teaching team, and developed four generations of prototypes to solicit increasingly detailed feedback. Our final product is a semi-functional prototype which presents a clear vision of a Progress Widget which can serve multiple purposes for both student teams and their mentors. It is an adaptable map of the design journey, a gateway to a resource library with descriptions of each DT step available when and where students need them, a gauge of progress within the design journey, a communication hub to collect notifications, and an overview tool allowing mentors to see individual contributions to the overall project and to each design step in the journey.