Question asking in design reviews: how does inquiry facilitate the learning interaction?

Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom [email protected] Abstract: Design reviews are common educational practice in design disciplines, where students meet with instructors and other stakeholders to discuss the progress of a project they are engaged in. Such reviews are tightly coupled with project-based learning approaches in the design studio. A number of research studies have looked into various characteristics of instructor-student interactions during design reviews. In this study, we investigated the question-asking behavior of instructors, students and clients. We paid particular attention to high-level questions that relate to causal and generative reasoning. We analyzed 22 reviews involving six undergraduate industrial designers, who undertook design projects individually. We observed that the instructors and clients were not effective in modeling question asking behavior for the students during the reviews. We also observed that the structure of the reviews did not facilitate the desired behavior either. Consequently, we present a theoretical framework that proposes a more explicit structure for design reviews, deliberately addressing particular aspects of the design process. Ultimately, we suggest that instructors should be inquisitive about the students’ design approach, and that the students should take responsibility for reflectively articulating their design thinking and actions during design reviews.