Lost in Translation: Examining the Complex Relationship Between Prototyping and Communication

Abstract

Prototyping plays a pivotal role in the engineering design process. Prototypes represent physical or digital manifestations of design ideas, and as such act as effective communication tools for designers. While the benefits of prototyping are well-documented in research, the fundamental ways in which the construction of a prototype affects designers' reflection on and evaluation of their design outcomes and processes are not well understood. The relationships between prototypes, designers' communication strategies, and recollection of design processes is of particular interest in this work, as preliminary research suggests that novice designers tend to struggle to clearly articulate the decisions made during the design process. This work serves to extend prior work and build foundational knowledge by exploring the evaluation of design outcomes and processes, and communication strategies employed by novice designers during prototyping tasks. A controlled in-situ study was conducted with 45 undergraduate engineering students. Results from qualitative analyses suggest that a number of rhetorical patterns emerged in students' communications, suggesting a complicated relationship exists between prototyping, communication, and design cognition.

Novice Designers' Use of Prototypes as Communication Tools

“…Therefore, within the pitch, the role of the prototype evolved and the design team leveraged the prototype to both explain and justify their solution. In future work, we aim to uncover the manner in which students justify, or rationalize, their design outcomes, as prior work suggests novice designers tend to distance themselves from failures in prototyping tasks, and attribute these failures to external factors, such as a scarcity of time or resources (Krishnakumar et al, 2021). Through our preliminary results, we note some similarities in how novices and experts use prototypes to explain design outcomes and persuade audiences about the success and effectiveness of the design outcome.…”

“…Prior work has demonstrated that novices tend to see prototyping primarily as a method to evaluate the functionality of a design solution (Deininger et al, 2017;Lauff et al, 2017). Recent work by Krishnakumar et al (2021) also suggests that novice designers struggle to rationalize their design decisions after a prototyping task, often attributing failure to external factors and employing a number of rhetorical strategies to justify their design solution.…”

“…Yet, novice designers often do not see the potential of prototypes as communication tools. Further, there is only a limited body of research investigating novice designers' use of prototypes to communicate design solutions to an external audience (Krishnakumar et al, 2021). This gap in the literature creates an opportunity for us to study how novice designers employ prototypes during interactions with external audiences, which will be foundational for guiding future design education best practices.…”

Investigating the Effect of Sketch Quality on the Shared Understanding of Design Dyads

“…The criticality of design artefacts to the design process more broadly, and to design communication more specifically, is well documented (Krishnakumar et al, 2021). Sketches, prototypes, and digital models can help designers build a shared understanding of the design space.…”

Design Argumentation on Multidisciplinary Teams: An Analysis of Engineering Design Team Communication Effectiveness

“…Researchers have examined how engineering design language is used to communicate design work and how this language evolves over time during undergraduate and practitioner settings [14][15][16][17][18] even finding that effective argumentation can result in improved designs [19]. There are multiple forms of communication that are used to advocate for a design, such as linguistic cues [25,26], engagement with props and prototypes [20][21][22][23][24], written reports [27][28][29][30], and gestures [31]. However, students are typically only taught communication through a few traditional methods.…”