U101 Design Thinking: The Assessment of the Design Process
Peter Lloyd, Course Team Chair
Karen Ross, Course Manager
Traditional Assessment in Design Schools
Assessing the creative work of students on ‘traditional’ design courses is primarily a group or individual face to face activity with tutors criticising the work of students in a constructive dialogue and the students interpreting and responding to this feedback in their work. Obviously this is not possible in a distance-learning context so in the development of U101: Design Thinking we have been looking at ways in which we can comment on, evaluate, and assess the creative design work of students.
Outline of Assessment Strategy
The table below illustrates the range of assessment activities we have planned for the course. A number of interactive CMAs will test comprehension of basic course concepts, while TMAs will develop the creative side of the students’ abilities. TMAs 1 and 2 will, in developing some basic design skills, introduce students to Compendium, a tool that they will use in subsequent assignments (TMAs 3, 4, and 5), and that we will use for assessment. The course ECA will consist of a portfolio of the prototypes produced in TMAs 3, 4, and 5, along with a synoptic iCMA, and a 1500 word reflection on their design thinking.
Block 1 / iCMA 1 (2%)TMA 1 (8%)
iCMA 2 (2%)
TMA 2 (8%)
Block 2 / iCMA 3 (2%)
iCMA 4 (2%)
TMA 3 (24%)
Block 3 / iCMA 5 (2%)
iCMA 6 (2%)
TMA 4 (24%)
Block 4
TMA 5 (24%)
ECA / Synoptic iCMA / Portfolio (TMA 3, 4, 5) / Reflection (1500 words)
U101 Outline Assessment Guide
Assessing Process not Product
TMAs 3, 4, and 5 will be design projects aimed at producing a prototype design product. This could be a tangible physical product or an intangible digital product, but both will be expressed digitally. The process of design – the gathering of information, inspiration, references, and ideas, and working this through to a solution concept – will be documented using Compendium and this will be what is assessed for these TMAs. This reinforces the idea that design thinking is about applying an organised process to a problematic situation, not just about producing beautifully crafted products.
What precisely will be assessed within Compendium is still open to debate. There are a number of mechanical factors – the number of information nodes in a compendium ‘map’, for example, or the dates and times that information was added – that we could simply draw out of a student’s compendium map, but mainly assessment will involve an AL looking through a map and evaluating the quality of work that has been done, perhaps in online discussion with one or a number of students.
The other aspect of design thinking that we would like students to learn (and hence that we need to assess in TMAs) is their ability to read, and contribute to, the design world. We are currently developing an online design studio, which we are calling OpenDesignStudio, that will allow students to show the work they are doing – in the form of digital images, videos, graphics, and text – receive comments from other students on this work, and give comments to other students about their work.
Students will literally be able to enter the design studio, as they would in a conventional design education, and talk with other students. There are a number of ways this could be assessed. If students have to log in and out of the design studio we have a baseline time that they’ve notionally spent there. But we would like to encourage them to engage with other students, so some sort of reward mechanism for leaving helpful comments needs to be formulated (there are precedents for this on reviewing websites like Amazon, for example). The level of engagement a student demonstrates will also be visible on their OpenDesignStudio profile so there is a peer to peer element to the learning here.
The ECA
ECA will be built out of three elements: a portfolio of the outcomes of TMA 3, 4, and 5, a synoptic iCMA, and a 1500 word reflection on design thinking. As we’ve already mentioned for TMAs 3, 4, and 5 students will be assessed on their process and design studio activity, but this doesn’t mean they can’t refine their prototype for their ECA portfolio. Indeed we hope that students will continue to refine their designs before final submission.
Problems or Challenges?
Although our assessment strategy is relatively concrete there are still a number of issues that need further discussion and that might prove problematic. Submitting large file sizes (greater than 10mb for example) might be difficult, as might the consistency and expertise of ALs, and the reliable operation of online evaluation mechanisms.
For examples of the type of activities that we envisage students carrying out please see our course blog at