Making Sense of Design: A Thematic Analysis of Alumni Perspectives

In this paper, we present the findings of a thematic analysis on how alumni make sense of design in light of their undergraduate experiences in the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program. These findings are part of a larger embedded, sequential mixed-methods study on the overall alumni experience in EPICS and how this experience prepared them to enter the workplace. In this large-scale study, we interviewed a diverse range of alumni (n = 27), which were purposefully sampled from participants of a previous survey (n = 523). Our semi-structured interview protocol was informed by both the survey responses of alumni and the objectives of this larger investigation. As EPICS is a design course, the topic of design was explicitly probed throughout the survey. Moreover, interview participants often recounted how their design experiences in EPICS informed their current design experiences. Through the thematic analysis, we recognized themes related to design to be quite pervasive in the interview accounts. The objective of this particular paper is to articulate how authentic design experiences, such as EPICS, affect alums in how they understand and practice design in their careers. We discuss the multiple and also common ways that alumni understand and enact design because of their experiences in EPICS. The dominant way in which the participants understood design was as a cyclical, iterative process (i.e., lifecycle) – following the life of a designed artifact, system, or process. However, the alums demonstrated a lucid yet subtle recognition that the knowledge of design is shared by many stakeholders, including design teammates, customers, employers, etc. We discuss these findings in detail, and we elaborate on how their perspectives of design might inform how they do design.