Uncertainty, reflection, and designer identity development

Abstract

Uncertainty is a defining quality of the design space and it stands to reason that designers' personal attitudes toward uncertainty may influence design processes and outcomes via cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral channels. Individual attitudes and behavior patterns related to uncertainty may constitute a critical element of designer identity, which represents the synthesis of knowledge, action, and being. This qualitative study examined how graduate students in an instructional design course reflected on their experiences and beliefs regarding uncertainty.Participants were more reflective when discussing a general experience with uncertainty than their current attitudes toward uncertainty in design. Findings support the use of narrated reflection in design education related to uncertainty and identity. Implications for design education interventions and design are discussed.Keywords: professional identity; design education; design processes; reflective practice; design research Highlights:1. This study positions uncertainty orientation as an element of designer identity.2. The study examines reflection for identity development in relation to uncertainty.3. Participants achieved higher levels of reflection when discussing a general experience.4. Participants consistently failed to attend to emotional aspects of uncertainty.5. Some participants altered their uncertainty orientation when reconsidering the topic later. UNCERTAINTY AND IDENTITY 3Professional identity has been conceptualized as the synthesis of knowledge, action, and self, requiring not only the acquisition of expertise and skills but also professional ways of being (Dall'Alba, 2009; Tovey, Bull, & Osmund, 2010). From this perspective, students in professional education programs need to establish a sense of who they are becoming as a professional -and imagine who they might be -as the context for the development of the knowledge and behaviors that are manifested via the professional self (Dall'Alba, 2009). For design students, this means that foundational learning (i.e., what design is and what designers do, both in general and discipline-specific) should not be seen as an end in itself but should instead be used to facilitate the establishment of a preliminary and personal sense of what it means to be a designer. For design educators, this raises provocative questions: What designerly ways of being might be most useful for the initial cultivation of designer selves? And what instructional strategies and experiences might be effective in giving students the space and resources to explore these ways of being in service of identity development?As part of a long-term, design-based research project on design education, reflection, and professional identity, this study seeks to address these questions and contribute to emerging discourse on identity development in design by examining how graduate students in instructional design explored experiences with uncertainty using reflective writing. As a ground for our findings, we will first discus...

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