Probing Documentation Practices: Reflecting on Students’ Conceptions, Values, and Experiences with Documentation in Creative Inquiry

This research examines how maker-based teaching and learning impact the ways students practice and value process documentation. Educational environments like design studios and makerspaces rely heavily on the physicality of students’ work in hands-on, creative mediums. Transitioning learning and making to remote formats due to the pandemic provided an opportune moment to reflect on creative making curricula and its relationship to space, tools, and materials. Using a research-through-design approach, we deployed a remote design probe to examine students’ current understanding, contexts, values, and experiences with documentation and its integration with technology, space, and education. We report our findings from five activities completed over a one-week period by 15 students enrolled in undergraduate interdisciplinary creative programs. We illustrate how students have been navigating documentation practices as they continue to learn and work in new, remote settings. We demonstrate that despite different disciplinary standards, students share common values in how documentation connects with deeper learning processes.