Narrative as a Cognitive Scaffold for Human-Centered Design Education:A Case Study of Schema Change in Interaction Design Students

Abstract

Human-centered design (HCD) education has long faced a gap: while students can readily produce ideas, they struggle to integrate scattered concepts into coherent interaction design works. This study examines whether narrative pedagogy can help interaction design students develop such integrative cognitive capacity, with two aims: (1) to analyze how students' creativity schemas across the four ION dimensions change under narrative pedagogical intervention, and (2) to examine the role of narrative pedagogy as a cognitive scaffold in shaping students' design thinking. The study adopts Kim's CATs model as its primary framework, using ION thinking combined with Creative Attitudes, and draws on Meisiek et al.'s schema-change modes for describing cognitive change. Situated in an eight-week Story Creativity and Narrative Design course at National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, this qualitative multiple-case study tracked three interaction design students through pre-, mid-, and post-course semi-structured interviews, with intercoder reliability checked across three independent coders. Findings reveal changes across all four dimensions: the basis for judging work shifted from personal feeling to design purpose; the starting point for ideation shifted from direct personal association to first defining the audience and then constructing content; the way of organizing design elements shifted from juxtaposition to causal chaining; the use of emotion and playfulness shifted from passive reception to active deployment for conveying messages. Among these, metaphorical thinking was the only capability emerging during the course, while others were refined mid-course and internalized post-course, persisting after the instructor's scaffolding was withdrawn — this temporal pattern provides concrete empirical support for the claim of narrative as scaffold, and this structure aligns with the integrative capacity required by interaction design practice. The study therefore argues that narrative in HCD education should be reframed from a communication skill to a scaffold for design cognition; for design educators, this means narrative practice can serve as a practical pedagogical intervention for cultivating integrative design capacity.

Keywords: Narrative Pedagogy, Cognitive Scaffolding, Design Process, Schema Change, Human-Centered Design Education, Qualitative Case Study

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008082