The Role of Learning- and Presentation- Portfolios in Design Educations

Students that primarily study design through team-based projects often struggle to develop presentation portfolios that differentiate from the ones of other students. In the industry, design managers experience this as a problem, as they often receive job applications with presentation portfolios that look very much alike. This raises doubts about the competences of the individual applicant. A solution to this problem could be to systematically generate more individual content in the form of learning portfolios throughout the design education. Based on limited knowledge about the implementation of the portfolio method in engineering design educations, this research project has investigated the method as part of a course programme. The preliminary experiments and results show that learning portfolio templates are effective in strengthening certain activities. On the other hand, the method risks draining resources from other activities, which is why the templates have to be carefully balanced in order to achieve the desired effect. The portfolio method proved to be especially good at illustrating process related competencies.