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5. Findings
The student-reports and learning designs mockups represented a wide variety of visualizations contextualized by the phases of the DBR structure. The interviews revealed that, initially, the students attributed no meaning to and saw no significance in their visualization practice. Typically, their recall of visualization experiences was vague when they described how they developed ideas, design drafts, and mockups. For instance, they had difficulties in explaining what happened between idea emergence and idea choices. However, the interviewer’s request for exemplification made the students recall their real practices. The last parts of the interviews were
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richer in descriptions of the actual visual practice and helped by the concrete exemplifications, the students gradually came to reflect. The following section present findings from the empirical data.
5.1 How the students made visualizations
The material showed a variety of commonly used types of visualization. The students used analog sketching on paper and whiteboards, digital sketching, digital design elements, self-produced photos and photos from the Internet, video footages for scenario production, and drawings as visual elements in mockups. All groups explained that they took on a random and/or pragmatic approach to the choice of media. Either they chose media based on easy access or usability (e.g., Marvel App or Go Animate) or the convenience of having quick access (e.g., pen and paper). One group mentioned that a specific app had limitations in access to preproduced visual elements, which ended up determining the final choices of how the visual production of a prototype would look. Thus, this group’s choice of digital tool was a result of the negotiation between digital apps based on their usability. Most groups used manual and analog sketching for their first ideas and then shifted to digital tools for the design phase. One group made a drawing and then used Adobe Illustrator for a makeover to make the drawing “look better”. The visualizations showed no evidence of explicit style or genre choices. One group made drawings on paper to an animation using the StopMotion app. No groups reflected on the aesthetic qualities involved in choosing one media rather than another. One group stated that they agreed on the same visual expression of the design immediately. This may be either an extraordinary coincidence of similar taste or a lack of ability to take a stand. The diversity of visualizations represented in the study exemplify and support results from elementary school (Meyer 2015) showing how digital media provide new visual practice in which existing materialities and their visual representations find new forms in combination with digital artifacts and software.
5.2 How students used visualizations for different purposes
The organization of the course as a DBR process influenced how the students used the visualization practice.
Several groups stated that they had already developed ideas in the initial phase, where they were working on identifying the case problem and doing context inquiry. This was partly because they were asked to conduct a rapid process to practice the idea of DBR, partly because, with reference to Schön’s distinction, they started thinking about problem solving rather than problem setting (Schön 1983). The informants stated that they started the visualizing practice rather quickly for generating ideas because they were inspired to find a solution as soon as they read the case content. They used whiteboards or paper for visualizing ideas from their brainstorming. The brainstorming typically produced a storyboard, mind map, or sketched visual elements.
Asked about why they started by visualizing ideas instead of verbally discussing them, all the groups stated that it was necessary for creating a common understanding of an idea. Some reflected on how something’s appearance in one’s imagination may be different from that of another group member. Others had experienced that, for some time, they thought that they all were talking about the same idea in the group, and when the idea was visualized by one of the others, it turned out that they were talking about completely different things. They considered such incidents as evidence for the importance of visualization. One group started sketching ideas for problem solutions with many specifications for an app before realizing that it would never work; they then had to return to work with the problem setting and exploring visual material connected to the context. Most groups stated that the initial phase was back and forth between problem setting and solving, and the visualizations served as a sort of mediator between the two movements. Thus, visualizations served as a rapid tool for exploring possibilities in the initial processes, as concretization of imagined scenarios, and as a platform for mutual understanding.
In the design phase, the visualizations served as concrete steps in the iterations of the initial ideas. Some groups retained a version of the initial idea and made smaller changes, while others developed new design ideas based on theory, field studies, and collaboration with the stakeholders. One group was quite far into a design when the group members decided to discard it and start over. In the design phase, the groups used visualizations for discussions and decisions about the design. They used more methods, like use case diagrams, acquired during the course lectures, and added them to their repertoire of visualization forms. During the design process, previous visualizations served partly as documentation for design historism in the groups and partly for the groups’ revisiting of them when working with design problems. The group stored them with the purpose of using them for remembering phase content and attachments in the final report.
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In the test phase, visualizations took the form of paper/digital mockups presented to potential users and the stakeholders. The low-fi mockups served for rapid feedback, and the groups could discuss the visual production with reference to the target group. Questions like the following were posed by the groups: Is this drawing appealing to the target group? Are these pictures too patronizing? Is the video’s framing of the problem insulting to the end users, and will it thereby create a barrier for learning? Are the visual elements in this app too childish or fancy? In all three phases of the digital learning design, the use of visualizations revealed a mix of different purposes. Olofsson and Sjölén’s (2007) differentiation in internal and external dialog appear less systematic and more intertwined, when nonprofessional designers use designing approaches for developing technology- enhanced learning practice. The internal dialog between the designer and a design problem and the external dialog between the designer and the stakeholders of a design solution seemed to be happening simultaneously in the groups as both internal and external dialogs when they navigated their way through the process. When it comes to presentations to the stakeholders, the external dialog is more explicit.
5.3 How the visualizations interacted with the knowledge generation in the group process
The visualizations’ role in knowledge generation throughout the design process took different forms in the different groups. When asked how the visualizations emerged during the design process, the groups answered differently. The data revealed three different categories of practice, as follows:
1. Collaborating on visualizing: A group develops and contributes alternately with visual elements and negotiates what stays and what goes. Here, the groups worked synchronically in time and were present in the same physical space;
2. Leading visualizer: A group appoints one member to perform the visualizations based on the group discussions. Here, the leading visualizer executed the ideas visually, while the rest commented and corrected; and
3. ‘Relay race’: Each group member takes a shift on the visualization task and pass it on to one of the other group members to continue the work. Here, the suggestions for change are communicated via the changes in the visualizations
Collaboration in the groups appeared to be either process oriented (Collaborating on visualizing, 1) or product oriented (Leading visualizer, 2 and ‘Relay race’, 3). When asked why they performed the actual visualization in a specific way and with a certain organization, the groups in categories 2 and 3 answered mostly with a practical rationale: We did not have much time or we perceived he/she was a skilled visualizer. The group in category 1 argued that by doing it collectively, not only were they able to correct visualization expressions, but the visual process also served as a driver for theoretical discussions related to the course learning objectives and design decisions. The three categories indicate that visualizations interact differently with meaning-making processes, although not all interactions may be considered in PBL pedagogy based on social constructivism. Some students shared knowledge by outsourcing tasks to each other, divided, for example, into reading articles, transcription of interviews, visualizing, testing, or contact with stakeholders. From this perspective, the study gives insight into how students organize project work individually and socially using pragmatic solutions. From another perspective, the study shows how other students used the collaborative process and visualization as a sort of boundary object for negotiating meaning and constructing new knowledge. Furthermore, some students stated that they used the visualizing practice as a mode of understanding the theoretical lectures. They connected the concrete materialization of designing to understand theory and stressed that this approach helped not only to understand theory but also in determining how to apply it to the design practice. This indicated a reference to the design principle for theory-generating practice that was integrated in the course design (Buhl 2016).
To summarize, the data indicated an added dimension to Burri and Dumi’s (2008) discussion about how scientific images and visualization forms take part in diverse social contexts when leaving science, thereby gaining a different life. The real visualization practice among university students taking courses in the humanities shows that diverse scientific visual cultures create mergers of genres, styles, and media, along with mergers of knowledge practices, group organizations, processes, and products. Furthermore, the data revealed that visualization served as a sort of unacknowledged factor in many facets of learning practice.
6. Conclusion
This paper was initiated from the claim that visualization is overlooked as actors in academia and the study revealed them to be involved in knowledge practices in two specific courses. However, the empirical study
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revealed a randomness of media-, genre-, and style choices mainly based on limited aesthetic skills among the university students that participated, and it was explained as the result of an educational down-prioritizing in the Danish educational system’s elementary and secondary schools. Furthermore, the study revealed a limited focus on own visualization practice among students, who at the same time, had proven they were present as a resource for learning in all phases of their projects. By their actions and reflections, all the groups in the study showed that visualizations are crucial for making imagined ideas concrete and producing shareable suggestions.
In other words, the role of visualizations is that of communication glue in collaborative processes where ideas are developed and discussed, problems are set and solved, target groups are identified, stakeholder collaboration can take place, and theory can become understandable and applicable. However, the lack of visualization training and attention to the potentials of visualization in university education are critical problems in a society with a growing digitalization, where images and visualization are ubiquitous and integrated in all parts of knowledge generation.
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