2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

High-impact, evidence-based educational practices offer exciting new visions for effective learning experiences in engineering education. However, the discourse surrounding these practices can sometimes oversimplify the complex design work required to implement them in specific contexts. While high-impact practices provide valuable starting points for educational innovation, adapting them to different resources, integrating multiple goals, and aligning with broader institutional initiatives involves intricate design processes. This complexity is often under-appreciated, with the work of educators frequently viewed as mere adaptation or implementation rather than as significant design efforts. Recognizing the everyday work of educational practice as resulting in design solutions, and seeing educators as designers, is crucial for advancing engineering education.

Against this backdrop, this proposed paper aims to raise awareness of and demystify Research through Design (RtD) as a scholarly approach relevant to engineering education. Despite the prevalence of design work in engineering education, there is limited systematic analysis of how RtD methodologies are currently employed and how they might be enhanced. This paper will explain RtD, a method common in other design fields, which attends to the process and products of designing, and the knowledge generated through design work. Specifically, it will focus on a flavor of RtD that involves examining a collection of solutions to a common design problem to identify and make sense of variations in the solutions, resulting in an inductively identified articulation of the solution space.

The approach being used builds on existing instances of RtD in engineering education, analyzing select cases focused on designing prompts for team conversations, reflection practices in engineering courses, ungrading methods, an "inverted" doctoral seminar, and "seeing across projects" activities. The analysis explores trends and challenges within each step of the RtD process: collecting information on design solutions, conducting comparative analysis, communicating the solution space, and explaining its significance as a form of knowledge.

Results will focus on trends and challenges in each step of the RtD process. Preliminary analysis suggests the following. In data collection, authors typically had access to information through personal knowledge or existing research, though the process was time-consuming. Communication of findings often employed dimensions of variation as a language, which became cumbersome for complex projects. All cases began to explain the benefits of their frameworks, advocating for their use as heuristics, though none had yet deployed the frameworks to assess impact.

This work will help to demystify RtD and positions others to contribute to the field in engineering education contexts. Future work can explore identified challenges, such as using design cases to address difficulties in understanding solutions. This work will emphasize RtD's potential to celebrate everyday innovation in education, bring more educators' work into scholarship, and address the research-practice divide.