Background: In every human-centered design (HCD) class I teach, I require students to keep an ongoing design notebook. If students are new to design thinking / human-centered design, I will spell out more specifics about why and how to keep one (e.g. 5x8 moleskine notebook, etc.), but in upper-level courses I relax this requirement a bit, allowing students to choose their own preferred mode of keeping design notes. The intent in either case is to make getting ideas/thoughts/questions out of your brain and onto "paper" a regular part of their HCD practice.

From the INTER-HE 940 Syllabus

Design Notebook

A Design Notebook will serve as a visual log of ideas and projects (sketches, diagrams, and reflections on each project stage/phase completed). Notebooks are to be carried everywhere and filled out faithfully throughout the term. The key objective is to learn the design habit of “thinking out loud”—capturing thoughts to be material at a later point.

This notebook should also serve as a space to take notes during research, brainstorm ideas, and reflect on independent readings over the course of your project work. This notebook is not intended to be filled with book reports – just a record of what you’ve read and jot down 3-4 takeaways that resonate with you or the project. Notebooks will be checked at the beginning of class, and as long as you’re filling it in your own way and can explain the items in it, this requirement will be satisfied.

Students needing an alternative for the written notebook portion of the course should discuss accommodations with me as soon as possible.

Assignment Page - Tweaked for Remote Learning

Typically I check students' design notebooks every 1-2 weeks in-person. This moment is casual, but does spark amazing conversations about where students are in the process and how I can offer help. Remote teaching has meant having to make the submission moment more discrete. Hence the design notebook assignment in Canvas, which I have required they do four times over the course of the semester.

Step-by-step of how I created the assignment:

Created a google presentation template for the submission with guidelines for how to drop in photos of the design notebook, linked here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KNyDPzLtDatciL6m4dbgKIaroNYDemzO_9D1gq7ahl8/edit
Created a slight tweak of this link so that when directed to it, the presentation would prompt students to create their own copy of the presentation, rather than edit mine. See a how-to guide for this here (Links to an external site.), but this involves simply tweaking the url ending to display as "copy" rather than "edit." (Huge props to Andrea Johnston for this tip!)
Took screenshots of the process so there was no confusion as students went through the steps.
Created the Canvas assignment page shown below.

Link to canvas page: https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/244403/assignments/1126934

Full image showing canvas page:

canvas page for design notebook assignment