Using alien-centered design for teaching iteration in the design process in undergraduate design courses

Abstract

Design and design thinking are crucial skills engineers need to develop. Alien-centered design is a teaching strategy that has been used in the First Year of Engineering at a Midwestern research university to facilitate students' awareness of and understanding of the user, contributing to their becoming human-centered designers. With this teaching strategy, the problem students are posed is to create a design to reduce one difficulty that a group of extraterrestrials (or aliens) could face when arriving to earth when taking some classes at their university. This document presents the details of one experience using this instructional intervention. During this particular semester, there was a special emphasis on teaching students why iteration is needed when creating a design solution in order to fulfill customers' needs. The design project had five stages, and in each stage new information about the customers (the aliens) was revealed to students only if they asked for it. An overview of the information that was revealed to students and evidences of the iterations two teams demonstrated in their design process is presented. This evidence includes the students' descriptions of the problem definition they wrote at different points in the process and their design solutions. Additionally, some comments from students from the final evaluation of the course are also shared.