Assessment for Impact

This is a theme course of DfI theme 1: Design for Human Interaction.

In this course, you will learn about various methods to assess human factors for design and the impact of design on human wellbeing and performance. The course will provide you with tools to critically embed research in your future design work and aim at delivering just and convincing design interventions, including verifying/validating these deliver their intended impact. This will help you as designer to deliver convincing proposals to future investors, for example, or company executives to secure implementation of your design.

You will gain knowledge on relevant methods and tools to evaluate product-service systems (concept) designs for different research aims and contexts. You will gain a broad understanding of broadly available methods and academic research at IDE within the domain. You will engage more in-depth with some methods/techniques through group-work on setting up and conducting research into the impact/value of a specific product-service system design.

To broaden your knowledge and experience in research for design, you will engage from additional perspectives with research of other groups. Furthermore, this course provides sessions to increase your skills and confidence in collecting, processing and analysing research data and on visually communicating research outcomes.

The study goals of this course will be assessed by a group assignment (100% of the course grade) and individual reflection/review report (pass/fail).

Students will receive formative feedback on their research plan from coaches. In addition, peers will provide formative feedback on the research plan and on the annotated poster/presentation.

Summative assessment is based on a group presentation (poster/slides) and short written report (5-8 pages, executive summary/annotation-style).

In addition, students are required to submit an individual reflection and provide peer feedback to other groups. This report is marked with pass/fail.

As part of the peer review, the student will be asked to give grading advice to the coach of the group they reviewed. Yet, it is the coach's decision, whether the advice will be taken into account.