Designing Reflections + Final Portfolio Project
Sean M. Landers
Entertainment Technology / Emerging Media Technology at New York City College of Technology (CityTech)
Design Foundations I
Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity
This activity is a capstone portfolio, the culminating synthesis for a foundation course built on iterative design, thinking through media, and developing a reflective practice. Throughout the semester, as students engaged across rapid prototyping across media, they were tasked to complete preliminary freewrites and post-activity response writing.
This final activity gathers and makes use of those scattered pieces, making a final argument for the use and necessity of such reflective writing, even (especially!) in an age of AI.
Students document what they've made and design the presentation of that work, using their previous fragments of writing as a structure and support. This encourages to students to make sense of what they've made, to design the presentation of that work, and to draw meaning from the sequence and structure of the semester itself. The project is an archive and an interface, a user-centered reflection of their own design identity. The portfolio becomes a creative product and a reflective narrative: students explain their decisions, apply visual composition principles, and reflect on their identity and development as designers.
Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?
Students will:
synthesize work from across multiple project types and media;
understand and apply the principles of design thinking;
communicate ideas through formal and informal writing;
apply core visual composition & interaction design principles to create a cohesive user experience;
reflect on learning, growth, and process;
demonstrate an understanding of interaction design and design fundamentals;
engage with tools (Notion, Trello, Figma) introduced during earlier modules in a real-world, self-directed project;
Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?
This is a culminating assignment that comes it at the conclusion of the semester, but is most effective when the groundwork for it has been laid over the course of the semester in previous units, allowing students to accumulate a substantial body of writing to feed the process of reflection.
Assigned: Week 14
In-Class Support: Week 14–15 (Portfolio Inspiration, Artist Statement, Draft Workshop)
Final Due: Week 16
In-Class Time: ~3 sessions
Out-of-Class Time: ~5–8 hours over two weeks
Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?
Preparation: Students must have previously completed core projects (in the case of this course, three course projects, but it could be more or less), all of which include instructions that request brief (250-750 word), structured reflections on their process and product.
Instructor provides a structure, examples, and a sequence of scaffolded mini-activities (portfolio inspirations, artist statement, reflection prompt) both in previous activities and in this activity.
Instructions to Students:
Collect and describe each of the three projects completed during the term, which you have previously submitted in the form of project folders
Compose a 500–700 word reflective essay on design identity and learning
Apply principles of visual composition and interaction design to structure and present your work
Use any platform of your choice (PDF, website, slide deck, Figma file); justify that choice
Final portfolios must feel designed, not just assembled
This is the final assignment and represents 20–25% of the course grade; the other assignments represented in it previously accounted for ~50% of their course grade.
Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?
I began with
Clarity and Structure (30%)
Is the portfolio organized, legible, and navigable? Are sections clear?
Application of Design Principles (30%)
Are visual composition principles and interaction design principles applied thoughtfully across the whole portfolio? Does it reflect design thinking in its structure and layout?
Process Reflection (20%)
Is there thoughtful reflection on what you’ve learned and how your process evolved?
Representation of Design Identity (20%)
Does the portfolio communicate something meaningful about you as a designer?
Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?
This activity emerged from a desire to ensure that low-stakes reflections (e.g., freewrites), which had yielded thoughtful and interesting results in previous iterations of the course, were not merely disposable assignments. I hoped that incorporating them into high-stakes creative production as a precursor and an opportunity of reflection could yield a final expression of iterative design thinking; moreover, that it could take the format of the 'portfolio assignment', which sometimes feels stapled on and hastily presented and elevate it into a suitable capstone (which can model the skills and process necessary to succeed in subsequent high stakes capstones that they may be required to produce in subsequent course work).
The success of the activity lies in the clarity with which students articulated their growth, when given structured space to reflect. They learned to consider their audience in new ways, even when the audience was themselves, or potential employers, investors, or collaborators.
Challenges included time management — things get hectic at the conclusion of the semester. This is where it is helpful that so much of the material had already been produced; that this was, in large part, an exercise in structure and curation, and an opportunity to revisit and reflect on writing previously written. There was also the issue of tool friction — many of the authoring tools on offer had only previously been explored in project 3, and this assignment not only came on the heels of it, but had a substantial overlap between completion of project 3 and introduction of project 4 — that means there was a great deal of conceptual fuzziness as students tried to conceive of what their portfolio was and what it could look like. It also took a great deal of time to create the understanding of how this was more than just a cluster of previously completed assignments, and how it could be a designed experience; this was addressed most effectively through in-class checkpoints and exemplars.
Flexible submission formats were useful, but sometimes too much flexibility can be as frustrating as too little flexibility; next time around, I'll provide clearer tracks that I'll ask students to commit to early in the process, as well as a modification of the overall assignment write-up tailored to each track. This will also give the students communities of practice operating in the same mode of production; peer groups can perform reviews, share insights, and have informal working groups to share questions, concerns and frustrations with.
Next time, I plan to incorporate an early-semester preview of what a “design reflection” looks like to give students more scaffolding throughout the term; I also intend to introduce the formal writing component of overall reflection earlier in the process and request that students take their drafts to the writing center, in order to provide a more structured and comprehensive instruction in writing than I was capable of fitting into the semester.
Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.
I'm sharing links to the course OpenLab, as well as a page of the course assignments (Activities, low-stakes activities which structure their work overall, and Projects, which are the high stakes activities that demonstrate mastery) as well as the assignment for Project 04, the portfolio project.
Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/mtec1101-hd03-sp2025/
