Teaching design seems to require a focus on products. Not end-products, but the products of the process of design.
Students that are just starting out as designers do not –cannot– see what experts see. They do not see the complexity and lurking problems and hidden opportunities in their ideas. This must be brought in the open somehow, so that the student can be confronted with these unexpected features of their ideas.
Telling them doesn’t work very well, because the teacher uses words that don’t yet have the same meaning for the student as they do for the expert. Telling them in reference to the design they’re working on can work because students are interested and invested in getting their creation to work. But this is only possible when their ideas are in a concrete, specific enough form that they can be pointed to: “see?!”.
But again, what is concrete and specific enough, how far their ideas need to be worked out (even what “working out” means) is something students cannot properly decide yet. We need to tell them, in a way that they can understand. So we cannot say “materialized far enough so that its operation can be judged”. They cannot judge its operation very well yet, let alone judge how well they can judge this! Therefore, we must use different sorts of instructions to get them to produce the things that we know are the proper level of precision and materialization.
In setting up a design exercise and in coaching students, we must focus on process-products. Even more so because we know that they focus on end-products –the thing they’ll be graded on (and who can blame them?).
As long as students believe it’s the final product of the project that’s the thing they’ll be judged on (and often they’re right in thinking this), then that is what they’ll focus on. And they will apply their pre-exiting skills and judgement in determining what activities and products are useful to engage in and produce along the way. So when the value and role of those process-products is something they still need to learn, they cannot be presented as means to the final end-product. Without having created the end-product yet, this is impossible for them to judge. In fact, often these steps seem useless, irrelevant.
If we don’t demand to see lists, sketches, models, what have you, we never create the opportunity to say “see?!”.