CONFERENCES
E&PDE 2026 - 28th International Conference on Engineering & Product Design Education
The Conference will bring together representatives from education and industry interested in sharing new perspectives on design education.
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TOWARDS A TOOL FOR SCAFFOLDING DESIGN SYNTHESIS
Smit, Annet Jantien; van Turnhout, Koen; Hoogenboom, Mark C; van Rij, Evelien; Struik, Martin
Type:
Year:
2026
Editor:
Buck, Lyndon; Brisco. Ross; Bohemia, Erik
Author:
Series:
E&PDE
Institution:
HU University of Applied Sciences (HU), Netherlands; Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands; Independent design consultant; Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
Page(s):
91 - 96
DOI number:
ISBN:
978-1-912254-24-8
ISSN:
3005-4753
Abstract:
Many design tools support ideation and other divergent design activities. Design synthesis is a core design activity that is often under-supported. Students find it particularly challenging to integrate diverse forms of design knowledge and reasoning, such as stakeholders' and the team's aspirations, precedents, and evidence from other designs, user insights, and contextual reasoning, into coherent ideas. This paper presents the ongoing development and testing of a guided synthesis tool that intends to support this type of thinking. The tool aims to help students make explicit connections between different kinds of design knowledge and to structure their reasoning in the early stages of concept generation, laying a basis for later phases of detailed design and design justification. The paper discusses several versions of the tools and their evaluation with students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Although the prototypes received positive feedback, we are still on our way to establishing how design synthesis, design argumentation, and design rationale can be supported coherently. Early feedback suggests that our approach of combining different types of knowledge and design reasoning is promising, but supporting the actual moment of synthesis remains a challenge.
Keywords:
