Science AI Journal
Engineering · Research topic

Open research questions in Design Education and Practice

220 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 2,633 Design Education and Practice papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Faculty members, especially in non-education programs, lack formal training in instructional design. The study had to identify the specific instructional strategies being adopted by design thinking facilitators. The study had to examine whether the instructional strategies applied by design thinking facilitators aligned with those expected by the literature.

    Unlocking design thinking facilitation in higher education: instructional strategies used in the classroom · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the impact of DT facilitation on student learning outcomes, - Examining the effectiveness of different instructional strategies in DT facilitation, - Studying the role of facilitators' professional backgrounds in DT facilitation

    Unlocking design thinking facilitation in higher education: instructional strategies used in the classroom · 2026 · DOI

  • Yet, their integration into higher education curricula through multimodal design remains underexplored.

    Fostering Students' Creative Collaboration Through Multimodal Design Within Virtual Worlds · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for design practice and education. Future research should explore the potential of hybrid workflows to enable temporal elasticity in collaboration.

    Creativity and artificial intelligence in design · 2026 · DOI

  • The study identifies a gap in the understanding of how artificial intelligence contributes to creativity in design. The study highlights the need for a functional taxonomy of artificial intelligence in design.

    Creativity and artificial intelligence in design · 2026 · DOI

  • Taxonomies and tests of human skills ✔ Skills assessments in education ✔ Abilities and skills: Assessing humans and artificial intelligence/robotics systems ✔ An occupational taxonomic approach to assessing AI capabilities Artificial intelligence capabilities and their measures ✔ Identifying artificial intelligence capabilities: What and how to test ✔ Assessing artificial intelligence capabilities ✔ Assessing Natural Language Processing ✔ Common sense skills: Artificial intelligence and the workplace Reflections and a pragmatic way forward ✔ Tasks and tests for assessing artificial intelligence and robotics in comparison with humans ✔ Questions to guide assessment of artificial intelligence systems against human performance ✔ Building an assessment of artificial intelligence capabilities “It enables an understanding of the potential as well as the limits of AI capabilities at a detailed task level so we can describe more precisely how humans and AI are complementary.” Infrastructure, Human Capacity &…

    Investigating generative artificial intelligence’s role in logo design pedagogy: effects on learning experience and outcomes · 2026 · DOI

  • Further studies can explore the impact of ECD on design thinking in different contexts. Research can investigate the effectiveness of community advocacy and policy formulation in increasing access to ECD programmes. Studies can examine the role of ECD in promoting critical thinking and innovation.

    Early Childhood Education as an Instrument for Design Thinking: Cases and Examples · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of understanding of the role of ECD education by some parents and guardians. The limited access to ECD programmes in low-income rural communities. The need for community advocacy and policy formulation to increase access to ECD programmes.

    Early Childhood Education as an Instrument for Design Thinking: Cases and Examples · 2026 · DOI

  • Further studies can explore the application of the framework in other fields of education. Research can investigate the impact of the hidden curriculum on student learning outcomes.

    Implicit and explicit aspects of design learning: unveiling the hidden curriculum · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of understanding of the hidden curriculum in architectural education. The need for a more inclusive and ethically conscious approach in architectural education.

    Implicit and explicit aspects of design learning: unveiling the hidden curriculum · 2026 · DOI

  • comparative studies, but the lack of a consistent structure for Taken together, standards and comparison. Furthermore, none of these approaches focuses on the underlying organisation of topics, problems, and learning sequences—a problem for understanding how the complex information is decomposed to support learning. is particularly significant that 2.2 Analysing a pedagogical exemplar The study by Vrontissi et al. (2018) is a comprehensive example that provides a clear overview of the topics taught, a sequential breakdown of content delivery and exercises, and an analysis of student outcomes with respect to the content. This level of detail allows the structure of the learning process to be examined more closely, helping to address some of the issues identified in the previous sections transform concept; hence, Vrontissi et al. (2018) adopt a pedagogical approach that emphasises conceptual structural design thinking in architectural education. They state, “the objective is to eventually shift the focus from the actual formal composition of the material construct to the conceptual relational disposition of the inherent structural to structural organisation to a spatial one” (Vrontissi et al., 2018, 9). They achieve this goal by structuring their teaching activity in three distinct steps, which can be summarised as: (1) exploring structural principles, (2) translating the structural principles into an architectural idea, and (3) materialising the architectural idea.

    Teaching technical knowledge in architectural education: a framework for designing and reflecting on teaching activities · 2026 · DOI

  • The Design Challenge framework identifies seven key elements for initiating AI innovation but does not specify how to evaluate or iterate on design challenges once formulated; no study in this set measures whether design challenge quality predicts downstream AI product success or how teams should refine challenges during development.

    The Anatomy Of A Design Challenge For Initiating Ai Innovation · 2026

  • The technical challenges of traditional ceramic making remain a barrier for many creators - The lack of accessible digital fabrication methods for ceramic creation

    ClayScape: A GenAI-Supported Workflow for Designing Chinese Style Ceramics with Clay 3D Printing · 2026 · DOI

  • 1 Interplay of GenAI and Digital Fabrication in Craft Although prior projects have combined CAM-based design meth- ods with clay printing [5], or applied GenAI in other areas of digi- tal fabrication [65], they have not explored this particular hybrid workflow.

    ClayScape: A GenAI-Supported Workflow for Designing Chinese Style Ceramics with Clay 3D Printing · 2026 · DOI

  • Further study on the effectiveness of the approach, - Investigation of the implications for redesigning AI-mediated design tools, - Exploration of the applications of the study’s findings in different domains

    How Designers Envision Value-Oriented AI Concepts with Generative AI · 2026 · DOI

  • The gap between the potential of AI concept envisioning and the challenges of navigating value considerations and potential harms, - The lack of understanding of how designers navigate values and recognize potential harms in AI concept envisioning

    How Designers Envision Value-Oriented AI Concepts with Generative AI · 2026 · DOI

  • The toolkit was designed to be a standalone web-based experience, not integrated into existing collaboration or design platforms. Digital-only distribution limited tactile and collaborative interaction. Numerical sliders intended for quantified assessment contradicted natural collaborative practices.

    Developing an AI Concept Envisioning Toolkit to Support Reflective Juxtaposition of Values and Harms · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of integrated resources to engage with values and potential harms in early-stage AI concept design. The need for a toolkit that supports reasoning about technical feasibility, values, and harms during ideation.

    Developing an AI Concept Envisioning Toolkit to Support Reflective Juxtaposition of Values and Harms · 2026 · DOI

  • Speculative design has gained traction in theory, but its methodological foundations in the context of industrial design practice remain underdeveloped. The study aims to address this gap by exploring a hybrid methodological approach to speculative industrial design.

    Speculative Industrial Design with Reflective Virtual Prototyping: A Hybrid Approach to Research Through Design and Heuristic Inquiry · 2026 · DOI

  • Future pedagogies must foreground ethical awareness, collaborative authorship, and ecological responsibility. Architectural education should cultivate designers who think systemically, empathically, and critically.

    Human-AI Collaboration in Architectural Design: A Comparative Analysis of Conceptual and Computational Form Generation · 2026 · DOI

  • The rapid integration of AI into design disciplines necessitates an evaluation of its role in educational environments. There is a need to understand how AI interacts with conceptual design thinking.

    Human-AI Collaboration in Architectural Design: A Comparative Analysis of Conceptual and Computational Form Generation · 2026 · DOI

  • Managing complexity in product development. Balancing the need for innovation with the need for efficiency in product design. Integrating new technologies and developing new product styles.

    When Modularity Meets Mind: Product Innovation through a Behavioral Lens · 2026 · DOI

  • The conflicting arguments on MPD's impact on product innovation. The lack of consideration of designers' cognitive behavior in MPD literature. The separation of behavioral science literature from MPD literature.

    When Modularity Meets Mind: Product Innovation through a Behavioral Lens · 2026 · DOI

  • Pedagogical practices for teaching visual language often remain fragmented, short-term, and limited in scope. There is a need for a structured approach to teaching visual language in industrial design education.

    Understanding visual product language in industrial design education: a four-phase pedagogical approach · 2026 · DOI

  • The students had difficulty in making designs in the process. The students needed help from their family and friends to overcome the difficulties they experienced.

    Biomimicry-Based Design Solutions to Everyday Life Problems by 5th Grade Middle School Students · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Design Education and Practice

Most recent work

Find a gap in your own Design Education and Practice sub-topic

This page shows what the Design Education and Practice literature already flags as unresolved. To narrow it to your specific question, run the guided finder — it searches the gap library on demand and checks candidates against 250M+ OpenAlex works.

Open the Research Gap Finder →

Related topics in Engineering

Human auditory perception and evaluation
604 open questions
Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
486 open questions
Spatial Cognition and Navigation
441 open questions
Traffic and Road Safety
412 open questions
Concrete and Cement Materials Research
299 open questions
Digital Transformation in Industry
287 open questions
Advanced Sensor and Energy Harvesting Materials
283 open questions
Perovskite Materials and Applications
267 open questions
220 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 2,633 Design Education and Practice papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

Tools for your next paper

Gaps & Literature SearchFind open questions in any field — 120,000+ open gaps mined from our own library.Pre-CheckIs your paper ready? A Tier 1–5 acceptance probability in seconds.Journal FinderA ranked shortlist of target journals from a 17,500-venue index.Duplicate Publication CheckerCheck prior-publication & salami-slicing risk across 8 sources.Citation GeneratorFreeA DOI or title → APA, MLA, Vancouver, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS. No signup.Graphical Abstract MakerFreeTurn your findings into a colorblind-safe graphical abstract.

Compare the category — Honest roundups of the AI research tools, ours listed alongside the alternatives.

Command palette

Jump anywhere, run any action.