Learning from design failure, collaboratively

Effective design requires iterative cycles of learning from failure, where design teams evaluate their designs to identify problems and make iterative improvement. However, existing learning from failure models do not always take collaborative process, a key aspect of design, into account. The ultimate goal is to design tools to better support young design teams’ collaborative learning from design failure process in an after-school design club with students in grades 4-6. In this article, we examine how teams use discourse to learn from design failure collaboratively by analyzing video data and group artifacts. Our findings suggest that the specific communication process can support or hinder the learning from failure in design contexts and that there’s a need to support team’s regulation process so they can benefit from their design failure.