Inscriptions in Educational Design Team Meetings

Abstract

Drawing and sketching are known to have been immensely beneficial to the design process in many domains, especially those in which the focus is on a tangible product, such as a car or a building. In contrast to these design fields, educational designers deal with abstract ideas and concepts—with learning processes that are not easily visualized—either in the imagination or in design drawings. This may be one of the reasons why educational designers are lagging behind other domains in utilizing drawing practices during the early conceptual phases of design. This article presents an exploratory investigation of how three small design teams created and used drawings (inscriptions, in this study) in support of their face‐to‐face design activities. It presents a new perspective on studying the process of educational design and has implications for the design and development of educational design tools and environments, as well as for training educational designers.

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“…Research might also seek to further understand ways in which visual representations support social aspects of design, that is, as teams of educational designers increasingly ‘need to collaborate with a range of experts from various domains’ (Wardak 2016 : 281). It would be valuable to gain a better understanding of the benefits of drawing in educational design, and how it can ‘aid in developing a design culture, similar to other design fields, where ideas are communicated using drawings, early sketches are retained and referred back to in design conversations, and students are trained in using visual representations for communication of ideas’ (280).…”

“…Wardak ( 2016 ) notes that very little is known about the way educational designers use inscriptions to communicate ideas. Inscriptions refer to ‘visual marks, sketches, or images made through the act of writing, drawing, and engraving onto a surface’ (260).…”

“…The different types of inscriptions identified in Wardak ( 2016 ) included: thinking marks (simple annotations), composite written (e.g. lines connecting words to indicate a relationships), pure lists (e.g.…”

“…The study concludes that ‘early educational design drawings should be retained and recorded, for reflection and learning within a design project and to help in training newcomers to the area, and to stimulate the development of a richer vocabulary with which to talk about drawings in educational design’ (Wardak 2016 : 280). Wardak acknowledges that these approaches are generally not incorporated into our working practices and agrees that ‘the ultimate goal for educational design might be the development of a possible visual language, akin to a music notation system, which can make communicating design ideas more efficient’ (280).…”