Research Through Design: A Promising Methodology for Engineering Education

Abstract Engineering Education (EngEd) research is a fairly young and interdisciplinary field. As such, a wide variety of methods and methodologies have been imported from both positivist and interpretivist traditions in other domains. Design inquiry approaches, however, have yet to be widely adopted in the field. These research methodologies leverage design, not as a means of primarily solving a problem or generating an artifact, but as a means of surfacing theoretical knowledge. Given EngEd's roots in engineering, these approaches are a natural fit and hold promise for opening up new research directions. In this article, one design inquiry approach - Research through Design (RtD) from the interdisciplinary fields of Human Computer Interaction is outlined. This paper addresses the broad question: Why might RtD be a research approach of interest to the engineering education research (EER) community? To address this broad question, we address the following smaller questions: What are key features and key activities of RtD? What knowledge is generated by RtD/What kinds of research questions is RtD good for? What does quality or trustworthiness look like for RtD projects? How does RtD align with other research methods currently discussed in engineering education? and What types of projects could a RtD approach make possible? We explored the literature to identify ways that RtD is described and instances of RtD in contexts including engineering education, but also in contexts beyond engineering education since the research method originates in a different field. In addition, we explored how an RtD approach might intersect with activities we (as the authors) currently have ongoing. We analyzed the products of the literature review and personal explorations in order to address the questions. Based on our work thus far, RtD has promise as a method that is fitting for Engineering Education. But because it was developed in HCI there may be small contextual changes that need to be made to adapt it to engineering education. We think that introducing and adapting RtD in engineering education will allow us to better design learning experiences and better understand new ways of teaching and learning. It will help us formalize and share knowledge that we are already personally gathering in tacit ways.