Revealing Students’ Ethical Awareness during Problem Framing

Abstract

AbstractExpert 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.