Uncertainty, agency and motivation in graduate design students

Transformational education in design goes beyond the acquisition of skills and knowledge to involve the development of the self as a designer with an emerging but individual professional identity. For designers, the ability to engage with uncertainty in the design process can be positioned as a threshold concept in a transformation curriculum, one that allows them to understand themselves and their professional responsibilities more deeply than they had previously. Within a larger, design-based research approach, this study presents a qualitative investigation based on grounded theory of written reflections produced by graduate students in learning design in response to several prompts on uncertainty. Our findings indicate that (1) students experience uncertainty as an influence on personal agency; (2) many find uncertainty provokes complex, ambivalent emotional responses; and (3) students identify both internal and external strategies for managing uncertainty. Implications for design educators are discussed.