Design Education: Creating diagrams to help students understand complex problems

Although designers use diagrams as an aid to think and to communicate problems and situations in their practice and although some leading institutions have used them in their teaching, many design schools have not yet incorporated diagramming in their programs. This article proposes the use of diagrams to quickly facilitate the understanding of complex problems to design students. It proposes that creating diagrams helps students integrate information gathered from different sources and communicate their understanding to the class. The paper illustrates the concept describing a three-hour workshop with students from medicine and communication design, and analyzing the benefits of using diagrams in the class.