Tracing stories across the design process: A study of engineering students’ engagement with storytelling in an undergraduate human-centered design course

Stories help design teams develop shared understanding and vocabulary throughout the process of developing solutions and prototypes. While stories are widely acknowledged to be essential to the design process, their use by novice designers in university settings remains relatively unstudied. In this work, we examine the story practices of undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a one-semester human-centered design project-based course. We develop a coding framework grounded in narrative theory to quantitatively describe the presence of story and its constituent elements in student work. We also integrate three simple interventions in the course to facilitate students’ use of stories. After examining assignments (n = 162) spanning six iterations of the human-centered design process, we find that students show marked increases in their use of stories in the context of their prototypes. We also find limited improvement, or in many cases, a decline, in students’ use of stories in the observational and frameworks stages of the process. These findings suggest a relationship between design project iteration and novice designers’ use of story, building on previous research relating professional designers’ differing use of story across design phase. This work invites several opportunities for design educators to incorporate facilitation of storytelling practices into their design courses.

Duke Scholars

Author Vivek Rao Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs