THE PROJECT WORKBOOK AS A COMMUNICATION, ORGANISATION AND REFLECTION TOOL
Year: 2018
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Ahmed Kovacevic, Lyndon Buck, Peter Childs, Stephen Green, Ashley Hall, Aran Dasan
Author: Thomsen, Bente Dahl
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Aalborg University, Denmark
Section: Sketch in Design and Engineering Education
Page(s): 572-577
ISBN: 978-1-912254-02-6
Abstract
The project workbook as a collection of working papers, which are continuously generated during a product development process, is challenged by the digital media. The purpose of the project workbook is to maintain an overview of the documentation of the design process. For study groups, the mixed media constitutes a communicative challenge in the meeting with supervisors and external parties. Theoretically, all documents could be brought to either a physical or a digital form, so evaluations and reflections could take place in a fluid process. In reality, the hand sketches are produced continuously and partly also the physical 3D sketches while CAD models are only occasionally turned into subjects for comparative evaluations during the development process. This is a problem for the project-oriented learning, because it is based on the production of the repetitive knowledge. Such a fluctuating design process creates design representations in different phases that categorically belong to the same axonometric group, which also raises the question whether the project workbook should in fact be organized according to a design process model or taxonomy. The purpose of this paper is therefore double. Firstly, it aims to identify methods that can bridge the gap of documentation. Secondly, it discusses the pros and cons of the above-mentioned methods for cataloguing design representations.
Keywords: Project workbook, cataloguing, design representations, learning portfolio, sketch folder