The "compleat" design experiment: from soup to nuts

INTRODUCTION In this paper, we articulate a methodology for design experiments and situate it within the larger cycle of design in educational settings beginning with the initial conceptualization of design problems to the dissemination of educational products, hence the impetus for the second part of our title: From soup to nuts. The term " design " is used by a variety of fields ranging from art to engineering. In education, the type of research associated with the development of curricular products, intervention strategies, or software tools has been designated as " design research " (e.g., Brown, 1992; Collins 1992). In recent years, the number of investigators associating their work with this genre has become more prevalent in the literature and the focus of special issues in prominent journals in education including paper contributes to the collective attempt of the field of education to further clarify methods and perspectives on design research. Evidenced by the diversity of views incorporated in this book ranging from product development to children as designers, it is clear that design research is a complex endeavour. To begin our contribution to the conversation, we employ the theory of design from the engineering sciences as a useful analogy. Education research has been previously associated with an engineering process (as opposed to the sciences) by a number of 2003). These research programs warrant revisiting the metaphors and analogies used to guide their work in design research. To a certain degree, a large portion of mainstream education research is engineering if what we mean by engineering is to design products and systems that solve problems of import to society. This paper describes the concept of design from an engineering perspective, touching on the distinction between design and artifact. The meat of the paper (following the soup to nuts reference) presents a cyclic model of the overall design process and provides a detailed analysis of design experimentation and the role it assumes in the comprehensive cycle.. Finally, we present an extended example of a program of research that conforms to our notion of design experimentation. In the field of engineering, design is considered the essence of the profession. Engineers design. That is what they do. The emphasis of the word in this context is twofold-relating to design as the practices of engineering, and designs, the intellectual products that 1 those practices engender. As such, in the grammar we are attempting to …