Detailed design exercises help promote conceptual thinking: Lessons learned from teaching User Centred Design to an engineering class

The present paper deals with a teaching method aiming at overcoming the difficulties of students for conceptual or abstract thinking within a course of User Centred Design. Following the hermeneutic approach a series of small in class exercises have been planned. In those exercises students are urged to brainstorm from early on with all levels of solution representations --even detailed ones--, and then try to elevate these to higher levels of abstraction by questioning them through a peer critique process. The tutor all along that process facilitates several iterations between the conceptual and the detailed design solutions. Our experience has shown that when engaging in the above process, students become more aware of the value of the conceptual design, and are gradually developing a better understanding of it.