Mapping as Design Thinking: Can GIS Help Engineering Students Approach Design?

摘要

Spatial site design, accessed through GIS mapping, teaches three-dimensional data analysis skills invaluable for the contemporary engineering student. Integrating design-thinking strategies into such spatial processes allows students additionally to access the cognitive operations of creative design processes. This study will investigate student responses to an innovative site design workshop in which GIS mapping becomes a tactical device for introducing both site planning and design-thinking to civil & environmental engineering students. After a pre-test site design exercise 48 undergraduate engineering students were given a basic introduction to layered mapping (GIS) techniques, exploring both digital and analogue strategies for divergent exploration of site design. In the follow-up post-test design exercise students were taken through a more structured design-thinking approach for a similar site design project to the pre-test. This mixed-methods paper studies student self-assessment survey responses to the two design exercises as well as their written design commentaries, evaluating them for changes in attitude as well as in approach. Data reveal that even in such a short introductory exercise students reported an increase not only in GIS skills but in creative self-confidence, and their responses revealed a more iterative design process with generally higher values given by the students to their later-developing ideas, over a fixation on preliminary concepts. The value of such a teaching model is that student engineers are able to gain access to open-ended creative design skills, widely accepted as critical to the educational development of the engineer. Furthermore this exploration, rather than an additive course or exercise, is integrated into valuable GIS mapping and environmental site design coursework.