Figuring the world of designing: Expert participation in elementary classroom

The purpose of the present article was to analyze the interaction between elementary students and a professional design expert. The expert was present in the classroom, facilitating a collaborative lamp designing process together with the teacher. Using the notion of figured worlds (Holland et al. 1998), we explored how learning could be expanded beyond traditional schooling by bridging the world of professional designing and the world of the inquiry-oriented classroom. The data consisted of video-recorded design sessions (N = 11) and the “Lamp Designing” view of the project’s electronic database. A qualitative content analysis was conducted for categorizing the social settings, the design inquiry phases, and the designer’s activities during the sessions. Three distinctive foci of the participants’ activity were identified in the present study: (1) Design rationale, (2) Design practices, and (3) Design community. The results indicate that, with the designer’s support, relatively young students became aware of the rationale directing the design practice, and were able to solve multifaceted, complex design tasks. The figured world of designing was collaboratively created in the classroom during the continuous interaction between the designer and the students. This enabled the students to recognize the meaning of the diverse design activities and practices they were learning. The figured world of designing was perceived as a world of possibility for the students, providing them new insights for learning within the world of schooling.