Beyond procedural approaches to designing: a framework for supporting students’ hierarchical thinking through their representational journeys

This paper examines how designerly thinking, can be facilitated through the creation of design representations such as sketches, drawings, and 3D models. Doing this, we move beyond procedural accounts of designing to focus on how students use design representations to navigate their design journeys. Instead of only engaging in iterative steps, phases or stages of designing, we argue that designing fundamentally requires hierarchical thinking—the ability to move between different levels of abstraction and specificity which is evident in students’ design representations. Drawing on frameworks from professional design education, we adapt an existing taxonomy of design representations to align with the Irish technology education curriculum, by highlighting its relations to properties of design representations, different levels of hierarchical thinking and iterative designing. The proposed framework guides teachers and teacher educators in supporting students to strategically select representations that realise design ideas, while also enhancing design reasoning, metacognition, and the ability to move fluidly between different levels of thinking. Finally, we consider its implications for assessment, curriculum alignment, and pedagogical strategies, while also identifying potential limitations related to assessment-driven curricula and transferability beyond the Irish context.