Reflection in time: Using data visualization to identify student reflection modes in design

In design, reflection is a central practice that helps designers evaluate past strategies, synthesis knowledge they've gained and plan future actions. For novice designers, developing reflection abilities may be particularly important as it may both help them develop this specific ability and more broadly develop their design thinking abilities. However, the design process is fluid with distinct design stages that may happen in varying order and repeat or cycle in a sequence unique to the design context and designers involved. Reflection similarly can happen in different patterns across the design process. Thus, it is not clear when students may reflect. While past work in design has studied several aspects of reflection such as students' reflective practices or how reflection relates to design quality outcomes, less work has looked at how reflection is distributed over the design process. We seek to address this gap by proposing to analyze designers' reflection process through a data visualization approach to generate reflection plots of students' reflection activities in context with other key design activities. Data from a class of 28 students in a Midwestern middle school is visualized to discover what key factors distinguish how students reflect over their design processes and to uncover unique modes of how novices reflect temporally. Results identify four factors that distinguish when designers reflect: timing, duration, intensity and interweaving (with other activities). An examination of four cases unveil distinct ways in which students' reflection process can be characterized holistically. These results indicate there is high variability in regards to when and how students reflect, which can be used by design educators and researchers to better support student's future design learning.