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In this design case, we describe our design process that resulted in recommendations for a four-year undergraduate curriculum in transdisciplinary studies. The case is centered on a fast-paced, two-week design "sprint" undertaken by the two authors, which involved consolidating and synthesizing program evaluation data and course designs from the three previous years of a novel undergraduate transdisciplinary degree program, creating design blueprints that outlined program-level objectives, and identifying recommendations for future course-level design. In the process of completing these hand-off materials for the incoming team of instructors, we had to work through substantial ambiguity, balancing the needs of identified learner personas, the capabilities of existing instructional team members, and the end goal of producing students that had a flexible, personal transdisciplinary identity. This case describes the design activities we used, the instances of failure that precipitated our design sprint, the instructional and institutional constraints we faced, the blueprints for future instructional design we created on the course and program level, and the ultimate failure of the degree program we sought to support.

Our undergraduate UX program at Purdue University launched in 2016 as one of the first UX-focused undergraduate degree programs in the United States, intentionally designed to support the unique characteristics of a residential, research-intensive, land-grant institution. We designed multiple overlapping studio experiences that formed multiple connections among cohorts, supporting mentorship, cognitive apprenticeship, the construction of social bonds, and reflection on one's own development as a designer. Our program was experiencing quick growth, with our cohort size growing from 20 students in 2016 to 50 students in 2021. With the onset of pandemic restrictions, the challenges of "scaling up" and the challenges of building a virtual studio pedagogy thus met. Our "hidden curriculum" of peer feedback and tacit learning, critique as a means of socialization and feedback, emancipation of the self, and allowance for identity formation pointed towards studio properties that were central to our pedagogy and needed to be reformulated or rethought. I describe the resulting "dimensions of crisis" that impacted our pedagogy and practice, the new supports for studio learning practices that we designed, and how these changes may lead to lasting changes to our residential program once the restrictions of the pandemic subside.

Discussions around the unethical use of emerging technology have become increasingly common in our society. Despite previous research acknowledging the importance of including societal-level discussions in engineering and technology undergraduate curricula, there is a lack of research around college students' understanding of and engagement with the ethics of new and emerging technology. In this qualitative study, we present the results from 17 interviews with students from a range of engineering and technology fields, describing how they reason as both designers and consumers of new technology. Our goal is to characterize students' patterns of reasoning about the ethics of new technology, and, in this paper, we describe how this reasoning is argued from multiple stakeholder perspectives (corporations, government, professionals, users and society). Our findings indicate privacy, security and balance of power as the most relevant ethical issues to respondents, and that participants consider several stakeholders in their reasoning, often shifting among multiple perspectives. Furthermore, interviewed students often concluded their reasoning by either resigning themselves to the pervasiveness of technology or by pushing the liability concerns to one stakeholder while diminishing the responsibility of others. In each case, respondents frequently avoided entering societal-level discussions related to ethical issues of emerging technology. Our results offer relevant insights that can facilitate further work related to the research and teaching of ethics to college students, as well as suggest areas for future research particularly building upon participants' feelings of resignation in relation to unethical use of new technology.

In this design case, we describe a multi-year process during which a team of faculty designed a four-year undergraduate major in user experience (UX) design at a large research-intensive institution. We document the program- and course-level design experiences of five faculty members. This multi-year process has culminated in a dual-strand, integrated studio learning environment. Two types of studios--"learning" and "experience" studios--form the core of the program, with learning studios allowing cohort-specific skills development and practice, and experience studios providing cross-cohort opportunities to work on industry projects. We detail our process of developing this course sequence and the program-level connecting points among the courses, identifying institutional supports and barriers, the unique and varied skillsets of the involved faculty, and the growing agency and competence of our students in the program.

The generation and description of design precedent is at the core of design case scholarship. However, traditional standards of quality and rigor that are relevant for other types of design and scientific scholarship do not always apply equally to the generation of design cases. In this paper, I describe the nature of design precedent and the standards for evaluating precedent artifacts in a way that foregrounds access of the reader to aspects of design complexity in the design work being described. Standards of quality point towards the appropriateness and potential contribution of the precedent material to design knowledge, across the following dimensions: interest to other designers; rich representation of the design; articulation of transparency and failure; accessibility of style; and acknowledgement of complexity and scope.

Studio pedagogy has been used as a comprehensive approach to prepare students to practice within their chosen discipline of design. However, little is known about how students experience these learning environments, including the interplay of social and educational experiences that support the development of expertise and identity. To explore and evaluate this complexity, I used a critical ethnographic approach to immerse myself for one year in a physical studio and set of Facebook groups, which in parallel supported students' learning experience. I describe the "ethnographic toolbox" that I built and utilized to inform interpretations of the physical and virtual learning environments. This toolbox included analog and digital tools, along with many forms of sensemaking, archiving, and engagement with metadata that both structured and enabled my role as an ethnographer. I describe the set of tools, and use vignettes to illustrate how these tools were used in physical and virtual environments.

In this study, we describe similarities and differences in how faculty members from across disciplinary backgrounds conceptualize design. The study is situated in an innovative transdisciplinary undergraduate degree program centered on a studio-based learning experience co-taught by multi-disciplinary faculty. While faculty celebrated the opportunity to integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives, they showed a lack of awareness about differences in how they conceptualized design and design pedagogy, especially early on. In-depth interviews and sketches of eight faculty members provided insights on alignment around core concepts of design, design process, and design instruction. Common themes in design definitions included creation of something new, human-centered design, and focus on problem framing over solution development. There was disagreement on the relationship between design and other ways of knowing, such as problem solving and scientific reasoning. Most used process models incorporating non-linearity, iteration, prototyping, and balance between research and design ideation. While there were many similarities in teaching approach, the rationale given for decisions varied, highlighting underlying differences in how participants thought about teaching design. Instructional alignment is an important consideration in designing a transdisciplinary learning experience, but may be hard to achieve due to cultural and institutional disciplinary boundaries. Collaborative teaching efforts benefit when faculty engage in self-reflection, discussion, and engagement in meaningful synthesis work related to understanding what design is and how it can be taught. Such work will enable a team to create purposeful learning experiences which leverages the benefits of exposure to a range of design problems, contexts, users, and design "flavors."

"Designerly Talk in Non-Pedagogical Social Spaces" (Gray and Howard, 2014) is a paper on a study that was conducted as an early attempt to understand the kinds of talk students engaged in outside of the formal curriculum in student-run communities that enhanced their design learning. While the paper has only been available for a relatively short time, there has been wide interest in the confluence of social media, design education, and learning opportunities that exist outside of the formal curriculum. This reflection discusses more recent work conducted by the authors, and explores the occurrence of designerly talk in a non-classroom studio space and the ways in which designerly talk arises without the initiation or management by academics. The paper, "Designerly Talk in Non-Pedagogical Social Spaces" (Gray and Howard, 2014) is included as it appeared in "Journal of Learning Design" v7 n1 2014, with minor edits. [For "Designerly Talk in Non-Pedagogical Social Spaces," see EJ1020704.]

Students live and work in worlds where virtual communities, such as those created via social network sites (e.g. Facebook) may interplay with their formal learning, but scholars of design pedagogy know little about how these spaces can support design learning. In this study, we describe how a set of informal communications, encapsulated in five student-created and managed Facebook groups, functioned as part of the overall pedagogy in an interaction design Master's program. We discuss ways in which students may learn in these spaces apart from the formal curriculum, and document instances where communication with other students and practitioners brought about instances of self-directed learning and sharing of expertise. Some of these learning experiences emerged as designerly talk through our investigation of extended comment threads in these Facebook groups. We present the conventions of the discourse and four types of design learning embodied in specific examples, noting implications for design pedagogy and the recognition of a student-generated hidden curriculum.

Research on design pedagogy has shown that students progress through a variety of barriers on the path to becoming a successful design practitioner, and that frameworks for explicit reflection can be beneficial to the development of design students. Schön uses the concept of reflection-on- action to describe one form of reflection on design practice, with the eventual goal of improving design processes and judgment. In this study, sketching is used as a form of reflection-on-action in a first semester intensive course in interaction design (IxD). This sketch reflects the student's current understanding of the "whole game" or holistic view of design in IxD. Current practitioners in IxD companies were asked to draw the "whole game" sketch as well. Parallels among the sketches and areas of divergence are discussed. In summary, students shifted from abstract, linear representations of process early in the semester to more concrete, iterative representations by the end of their first semester. Practitioner sketches were more abstract and linear, but also included representations of business terminology and design teams. We propose a preliminary model of change in expertise, which documents the shift in a designer's visual representation of their process as their expertise increases over time. Implications for changes in design pedagogy and avenues for future research are discussed.

Critique is a primary method of assessment and feedback used in design education, yet is not well understood apart from traditional instructor-led activities in physical learning spaces. In this study, we analyze a series of group critiques in a human-computer interaction learning experience, focusing on an emergent instructional design for technologically-mediated critique created by experienced students serving as peer mentors. Peer mentors designed complex interactions that supported assessment in the design classroom, including multiple technology-supported modes of critique beyond the traditional oral critique. The modes of critique, and the ways in which they intertwined, included: (1) public oral critique led by the instructor, (2) a critique document authored by experienced students in real-time using Google Docs, and (3) backchannel chat used by experienced students in Google Docs to facilitate and organize their critique. Using this model of distributed assessment, which we refer to as "multimodal critique," the amount of feedback and number of interlocutors increased dramatically, facilitating participation by students and peer mentors alike. These interactions indicate instructional affordances for including many simultaneous users within an existing assessment infrastructure using readily accessible technologies, and a means of activating student development at multiple levels of expertise.

Expert designers determine what problem needs to be solved by creating a frame that allows the identification of potential solutions. However, it is unclear how students learn to generate these frames effectively, particularly in relation to ethical decision-making and selecting appropriate constraints. In this study, undergraduate and graduate industrial design students at a large Midwestern United States university participated in a one-day workshop that focused on designing products for natives of sub-Saharan Africa to sell in their home nations. Participants (n=100) worked in 21 teams to generate a range of constraints and problem statements while being scaffolded by instructions, research materials and worksheets. Teams struggled to identify specific use contexts and users, even though these elements were present in relatively complex form in provided research materials. Students appeared to build distance between their own experiences and that of users they were designing for, leading to little awareness of the ethical and normative commitments that were reified in their problem statements and solutions. Implications for the explicit development of an ethically aware design character in design education are considered.

Numerous studies have shown the value of introducing cognitive supports to encourage the development of creative ability, and researchers have developed a variety of methods to aid in generating ideas. However, design students often struggle to explore more ideas after their initial ideas are exhausted. In this study, an empirically validated tool for idea generation, called "Design Heuristics," was introduced as a means of productively pushing past creative exhaustion in an industrial design course at a large Midwestern university. Students worked on a simple design task on their own, generating an average of 6.1 concepts in a 30-min session; then, after 10 min of instruction on the "Design Heuristics" tool, students generated an average of 2.8 additional concepts for the same task using Design Heuristics for an additional 30 min. The concepts created in this second session using Design Heuristics were rated as higher in novelty, specificity and relevance. These results suggest that students benefit from introducing support tools following a period of working on their own ideas. Once their own ideas are exhausted, students may be more open to using and learning from support tools, and these tools may support skill development while producing higher quality outcomes.

A wide range of design literature discusses the role of the studio and its related pedagogy in the development of design thinking. Scholars in a variety of design disciplines pose a number of factors that potentially affect this development process, but a full understanding of these factors as experienced from a critical pedagogy or student perspective is lacking. In this study, the experiences of six first-year design students were examined as they evolved in their conceptions of design. Data was collected during a series of three interviews. Analysis of data confirmed and recontextualized factors identified in the literature. Additional factors relating to group work, culture shock, critique, individual versus group identity, and the design influence of professors, mentors, and curricula are identified and reported. Opportunities for future research are identified.