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.