Strategies for Teaching Design Prototyping in Virtual Mode

Abstract

Prototyping is an ever-evolving medium that enables designers to bring their ideas to life. It plays an integral role in the design thinking process as well as in design education. However, in virtual or remote learning environments, teaching and learning a predominantly in-person hands-on course has not been investigated much. But due to the pandemic induced lockdown, this need became more evident which has motivated present work. This work presents a set of pedagogical strategies for teaching prototyping to undergraduate design and engineering students and a preliminary evaluation of the said strategies in a qualitative survey taken by the students of “Prototyping Interactive Systems” being offered at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT Delhi), India. The results demonstrate the potential of such strategies to effectively engage and teach prototyping methods and related processes in virtual mode.