Guidelines for visual digital tools geared towards teaching in design from a systematic review

Abstract

The use and rise of new digital tools highlighted by the emergency increase in remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, good practices can be established for better development of new tools. For this, the objective of this research is to conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on digital visual tools in the context of design education. As methodological procedures, the steps used were the ones proposed by Dresch, Lacerda and Antunes Júnior (2014), which aim at research within the scope of Design Science Research, namely: (i) definition of the review question and the conceptual framework; (ii) choice of the work team; (iii) search strategy; (iv) search, eligibility and coding; (v) quality assessment; and (vi) results’ synthesis. The final stage of presenting the study consists of publishing this article. Searches were carried out in six databases, obtaining 722 articles, from journals and procedures. After analysis, coding and reading of the texts, nine articles were selected for the compilation of results, and two more were added using the snowball technique. The main themes addressed by the studies were then raised, such as the concept of Creativity Support Tools (CST), visual thinking and collaborative design. Ten artifacts developed in these studies were also identified, which were grouped into problem classes and had their construction and contingency heuristics mapped. Finally, other concepts were added to the discussion, such as evaluation and reflection on the process, interdisciplinary practice, mutual awareness and instrumental judgment. These concepts, added to the initial ones, served as a label for the mapped heuristics and thus a guideline diagram was built for the development of digital visual tools. As recommendation for future work, it is suggested to use and value the term Creativity Support Tools for tools that use the principles mentioned in this research.