Nov. 12: Cindy Atman

Towards Design Agency

Are you an agent of your own design process? If you could see your design process, would that help you steer it?

Design Process Resilience is a course I developed in HCDE to explore these questions. Each week, students drew their design processes as postcards, shared them with peers, and examined them through ideas about resilience. Along the way, they became more aware of how they design, more comfortable with messy, non-linear work, and more confident making their process their own. In this talk, I will tell the story of the course and the story behind it, which grew out of 30 years of research on design processes. Then I will invite you to apply these ideas to your own design process. If you drew it today, what would it look like? What would you include, and what would you leave out?

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Cynthia J. Atman (Cindy) is the founding director of the Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching (CELT), a professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering, and the inaugural holder of the Mitchell T. & Lella Blanche Bowie Endowed Chair at the University of Washington. She was director of the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), a national research center that was funded from 2003-2010.  Her research focuses on design expertise, design education and the use of reflection to support learning.  She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE.) Dr. Atman holds a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.