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Misconceptions of designing: a descriptive study

Published:27 June 1999Publication History
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Abstract

Our experience in designing and teaching a cross-disciplinary freshman design class has led us to believe that students entering design fields (e.g., computer science or engineering) are saddled with naïve or (mis)conceptions about design and design activity. It is our belief that for students to become effective designers, they must be helped to recognize and overcome these misconceptions through appropriate educational interventions. To better understand the nature and substance of these misconceptions, we conducted a descriptive survey study of 290 freshman in a technological institute. Our findings begin to suggest a consistent profile of misconceptions across declared majors that start to explain observations we have made of naïve designers in our freshman design class. This paper reports on those findings.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
        ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 31, Issue 3
        Sept. 1999
        212 pages
        ISSN:0097-8418
        DOI:10.1145/384267
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          ITiCSE '99: Proceedings of the 4th annual SIGCSE/SIGCUE ITiCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
          June 1999
          214 pages
          ISBN:1581130872
          DOI:10.1145/305786

        Copyright © 1999 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 27 June 1999

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