How Design with Intent Cards Facilitate Behavioral Design Ideation for Humanities, Design, and Engineering Students

The behavioral design not only requires people with a background in the humanities and behavioral sciences to understand behavioral strategies, but also requires designers to translate these behavioral strategies into functional, system, or product details. It also requires engineering technologists to develop design concepts into real products. This study investigates the ideation ability of humanities, design, and engineering students, as well as the perspectives of their ideas. This study explores whether the Design Intent (DwI) cards, a card-based design toolkit designed to promote social and environmental behavior, can help students from different disciplines (humanities, design, and engineering) to generate better ideas to help target audiences change behavior. The empirical results show that students from design and humanities disciplines have better initial ideas. In addition, with the use of DwI cards, the number of ideas from students from all three disciplinary backgrounds, the rate of ideation from humanities and design students, and the quality of ideas from engineering students has been improved. However, quantitative data show that the DwI cards cannot alleviate differences in ideation among students from the three disciplines. On the other hand, the qualitative results of the post-interview show that after using DwI cards, the perspectives of ideas have become broader and more homogeneous among students from the three disciplines. Finally, this study discusses insights into future research and design practices for multidisciplinary collaborative teams, involving how to use the card-based toolkit DWI to allow team members to have a common communication language and idea base to facilitate the ideation stage of the design process.