Design ethnography in capstone design: Investigating student use and perceptions

In today's global markets engineers need to design products for a wide variety of stakeholders and cultures. Engineering students, therefore, must learn how to design products that meet the needs of the stakeholders and are appropriate for the cultures in which they will be used. Human-centered design guides students in developing design ideas that achieve this goal. This approach has proven to support innovation, increase product uptake, reduce errors, and focus the design on the user experience in addition to product functionality. Design ethnography is an important component of human-centered design and has been shown to be effective for understanding the true, and sometimes hidden, wants and needs of stakeholders and for informing design decisions. While the utility of design ethnography has been promoted within business and product innovation literature, student learning of design ethnography techniques has lacked study. This exploratory study sought to address this gap by characterizing the ways students use design ethnography methods during a capstone design experience as well as their perceptions of these methods within their design projects. Design report documents and semi-structured interviews were used to explore student practices and perceptions. Students used various design ethnography techniques including interviews (both structured and semi-structured), informal conversations, observations, and surveys. These were used throughout the design process (from problem definition to testing and validation), however, the methods were most frequently used when defining the problem, developing user requirements, and translating these into engineering specifications. Although there were numerous instances of successful uses of design ethnography, the focus of this study was on obstacles encountered when implementing these techniques to inform their design decisions. Semi-structured interviews revealed that students perceived both benefits of and frustrations with using design ethnography. However, the benefits that students perceived were often superficial in nature and the frustrations they encountered often stemmed from the challenges associated with open-ended problem solving. The results illustrate the need for the development of effective tools and pedagogy to support students when learning and practicing design ethnography. © 2014 TEMPUS Publications.

Duke Scholars

Author Ibrahim Mohedas Christensen Family Center for Innovation