Envisioning Future Scenarios: Teaching and Assessing Values-based Design Approaches

Abstract

This article addresses the need for teaching materials and systematized methods for teaching and assessing values-based design approaches. We do so by suggesting the teaching activity Envisioning future scenarios,which is based on utopian and dystopian scenarios in line with values-based design approaches such as speculative and critical design and related to design fiction practices. The teaching activity is presented with learning outcomes, instructions for how to implement it, corresponding assessment activities and criteria, and illustrated by a teaching case description. The article ends with a discussion on how the learning outcomes, the teaching activity, and the assessment are brought together in line with the principles of constructive alignment. Through this, we argue that the shortcoming of teaching materials and systematized methods for teaching and assessing values-based design approaches, such as speculative and critical design, can be addressed by aligning intended learning outcomes with teaching and assessment activities, and by applying a general structural framework such as e.g. the SOLO taxonomy, for defining and evaluating learning outcomes. The suggested teaching and assessment activities can be applied in educational domains as diverse as product and service design, engineering, architecture, media and communication, human-computer interaction, socio-technical studies and other creative fields.