Dealing With Ambiguity: Leveraging Different Types Of Expertise To Guide Design Questioning

Questioning is important for understanding the fundamental design process. Design itself can be viewed as a question driven process. When we consider question-asking behavior as a means to manage convergent and divergent modes of thinking by decreasing or increasing ambiguity, expert designers draw either from domain knowledge and/or their situational transactions. In engineering education, it is important for engineering students to acquire an epistemological inquiry process as well as learn how to operate in the concept domain. In order to develop an understanding of question-asking behavior in design and of how we can include both divergent and convergent thinking in design, we wanted to explore how design experts use their expertise to solve a complex problem through questioning. To do this, we took an inductive approach and examined the question-asking behavior of 6 expert designers during a 3-hour verbal protocol analysis where they were asked to design a playground. Three were domain experts (playground designers) and three were non-domain experts (engineering designers). Through our work, we learned that all the design experts in our sample ask questions and that their questions occur throughout their design process. Questions that decrease ambiguity were prevalent for all participants in our sample, particularly in the beginning phases of their design process. In instances where the design experts increased ambiguity through questioning, the questions were distributed among the questions that decrease ambiguity. The questions posed by the engineering design experts were predominantly based on technical aspects whereas the playground design experts posed questions related to community aspects in order to understand the social and physical situation. From our work, we conclude that the range of variability in the kinds of questions posed depends on the kind of constraint the design experts choose to focus on, their experience and the kinds of knowledge used. In this study, the questions posed helped the design experts understand and push problem boundaries as they engage in both convergent and divergent design behaviors. This has implications for teaching question-asking techniques to help students with their design process and outcomes.