Developing Designer Identity Through Reflection

can address every future situation effectively, so designers must be prepared to appreciate design situations subtly and with discipline, invent and re-invent processes, and take personal responsibility for the effects of their designs rather than handing off responsibility for quality outcomes to a single process or theory (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003). Designers act as human instruments, analogous to researchers in a nat-uralistic study, bringing their own acknowledged perspectives to the enterprise, working within emergent frameworks and adapting to situations unknown and unknowable in advance (Boling, 2008). Students of instructional design and technology (IDT) bring different backgrounds and abilities to the classroom along with very different understandings of what design is and their role in it. Historically, IDT has focused on the systematic design process, client, and content, with very little on the designer role in design situations. There is a growing trend in instructional design to shift from traditional, process-oriented conceptions of the field toward a view that aligns instructional design with the broader design community of practice and cross-discipline design thinking. Rather than being driven by models and strategy selection, this approach characterizes design as containing all of the activities and resources required to move from an ill-defined problem to a new and innovative solution that satisfies user needs. In this view, design is complex and iterative (Visscher-Voerman & Gustafson, 2004), requiring designers to embrace uncertainty as a motivating force; balance abstract principles against concrete details; alternate periods of intense work with relaxation in order to nurture inspiration; use models and prototypes to refine concepts and solutions; and leverage failure as a way to gain information and insight into the design problem (Cross, 2011). Those who view design through this lens, and who study how it occurs in practice, present design not as a smooth, systematic process, but instead state that designers' values, belief structures, prior experiences, knowledge and skills, and their approach to design affect final outcomes (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003). As such, design thinking highlights the central role that designers play in developing novel, functional solutions to ill-defined problems (Siegel & Stolterman, 2008). Designers recognize that problems and solutions are entwined concepts, but that the relationship between the two is complex, evolving, and often oblique. And as designers move through the design space between problem and solution, they must rely on their design intelligence and intuition, derived from large pools of experience and lessons learned from