An Exploration of the Design Methods Adopted by Industrial Design Students before and after Academic Educations

“Design” is referred to the process in human`s mind that results in creating a concept from solving a problem. Nowadays, academic design education has been improved considerably and research in this area entered a new era. The necessity of training to help the designers understanding and then implementing systematic approaches in the process of design is now very well appreciated in academia. Therefore, scientifically approaching the design matter and training experts to address this shortcoming for a wide range of professions is urging. This paradigm shift has caused some sort of complexity in the thinking process of designers. As the result, this has become an attractive subject in design methodology researches. In the current study the impact of academic studies on the problem-solving process of a design student`s mind has been investigated. In order to cover all aspects of such impact, an experimental study was designed and conducted to explore the essence of the concepts and skills that design students in University of Tehran acquire during their studies. Due to the obscure stimuli and responses, the study of thinking can be very challenging or in some cases not feasible. Therefore, to achieve this goal, protocol analysis was adopted in this research to study the thinking process for a number of cases. According to the literature, protocol analysis is an empirical observational research method developed to explore and analyse human behaviour. This method can be used to make a comprehensive understanding of the processes taking place in a designer’s mind. A protocol is referred the subjects` behaviours recorded in the course of time. With advancements in psychology and developing psychologically methods, verbal and thinking behaviour became an interesting subject where preparing verbal reports was begun. Thinking aloud which is the basis of the verbal reports in the protocol analysis, reveals the processes taking place in the subject`s mind during design. In this case the experiment was then conducted using protocol analysis on two junior students and two recently graduates, followed by the final study on two subjects. The junior student`s problem-solving behaviour was compared with the one recorded for graduate student. The differences were then categorised into three factors including time, problem addressing, and design phases. The junior subject was found to be more creative and has a freer mind in developing ideas. However, addressing the problem and describing the details were difficult for him. He showed to be more concerned about the general idea while, the graduate acted more systematic in problem-solving. The graduate subject became so involved in details that lost her focus on creativity. The results were discussed and represented in more details in the latter sections. It was concluded that academic design education, may affect designer`s thinking resulting in concentration on methodology and process-driven approaches causing a loss in creativity. The hypotheses however need to be investigated further in future studies. At the end of the report, the research constraints and future suggestions were also presented.