Effects of Industrial Experience and Coursework During Sophomore and Junior Years on Student Learning of Engineering Design

2006 ◽  
Vol 129 (7) ◽  
pp. 662-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reid Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
First Year ◽  
Process Knowledge ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Industrial Experience ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
Allot Time

While prior work indicates that seniors near the end of their capstone design course know more about design than first-year students, it is unclear where this knowledge is gained. We study two possible sources of seniors’ greater design knowledge: coursework during sophomore and junior years and industrial experience. The design process knowledge of seniors at the beginning of their capstone class was assessed and information about their industrial experience obtained. These data were compared to assessment data of first-year students at the end of an introduction to engineering design course. The results indicate that industrial experience greatly increases students’ recognition that documentation needs to occur throughout the design process. Seniors with industrial experience, however, are less aware that idea generation is an important part of design and are less able to allot time to different design activities than first-year students at the end of a hands-on introduction to engineering design course. For the remaining four aspects of design process knowledge assessed—namely, identifying the requirements for a project at the project’s outset, making decisions with a systematic process based on analysis, building and testing prototypes and final designs, and the overall layout of design including iteration—no differences are found between seniors with industrial experience and first-year students at the end of an introduction to engineering design course. One explanation for why industrial experience does not impact student’s design process knowledge positively in more areas than documentation is that students on internships only experience a small portion of a design process. Due to this “snapshot” experience, either (1) students are not able to learn a significant amount about the bigger picture design concepts or (2) students each learn about different aspects of design but, as a population, do not show any significant increase in design process knowledge. The one activity that all interns will experience is the necessity to document their work. Furthermore, seniors without industrial experience scored no differently than first-year students on any single aspect of design process knowledge measured. This indicates that analysis-heavy sophomore and junior classes do not impact design process knowledge.

Can Design Teams Be Empathically Creative? A Simulation-Based Investigation on the Role of Team Empathy on Concept Generation and Selection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Jessica Menold ◽  
Jacquelyn Huff ◽  
Christopher McComb
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
First Year ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. However, research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance, particularly in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Specifically, it is unknown how the empathic composition of teams, average (elevation) and standard deviation (diversity) of team members’ empathy, would impact design outcomes in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of team trait empathy on concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a design repository of 806 ideas generated by first-year engineering students. The main findings from the study indicate that the elevation in team empathy positively impacted simulated teams’ unique idea generation and selection while the diversity in team empathy positively impacted teams’ generation of useful ideas. The results from this study can be used to guide team formation in engineering design.

An Engineering-to-Biology Thesaurus for Engineering Design

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn K. S. Nagel ◽  
Robert B. Stone ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Biological Information ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Functional Modeling ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Engineering Designs ◽  
Design Activities

Engineering design is considered a creative field that involves many activities with the end goal of a new product that fulfills a purpose. Utilization of systematic methods or tools that aid in the design process is recognized as standard practice in industry and academia. The tools are used for a number of design activities (i.e., idea generation, concept generation, inspiration searches, functional modeling) and can span across engineering disciplines, the sciences (i.e., biology, chemistry) or a non-engineering domain (i.e., medicine), with an overall focus of encouraging creative engineering designs. Engineers, however, have struggled with utilizing the vast amount of biological information available from the natural world around them. Often it is because there is a knowledge gap or terminology is difficult, and the time needed to learn and understand the biology is not feasible. This paper presents an engineering-to-biology thesaurus, which we propose affords engineers, with limited biological background, a tool for leveraging nature’s ingenuity during many steps of the design process. Additionally, the tool could also increase the probability of designing biologically-inspired engineering solutions. Biological terms in the thesaurus are correlated to the engineering domain through pairing with a synonymous function or flow term of the Functional Basis lexicon, which supports functional modeling and abstract representation of any functioning system. The second version of the thesaurus presented in this paper represents an integration of three independent research efforts, which include research from Oregon State University, the University of Toronto, and the Indian Institute of Science, and their industrial partners. The overall approach for term integration and the final results are presented. Applications to the areas of design inspiration, comprehension of biological information, functional modeling, creative design and concept generation are discussed. An example of comprehension and functional modeling are presented.

A Novel Method for Providing Global Assessments of Design Concepts Using Single-Word Adjectives and Semantic Similarity

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Gosnell ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Rating Process ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
Design Idea ◽  
Gold Standards

Engineering design idea-generation sessions often result in dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas. These ideas must be quickly evaluated and filtered in order to select a few candidate concepts to move forward in the design process. While creativity is often stressed in the conceptual phases of design, it receives little attention in these later phases — particularly during concept selection. This is largely because there are no methods for quickly rating or identifying worthwhile creative concepts during this process. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop and test a novel method for evaluating the creativity and feasibility of design concepts and compare this method to gold standards in our field. The SCAT method employed in this paper uses word selections and semantic similarity to quickly and effectively evaluate candidate concepts for their creativity and feasibility. This method requires little knowledge of the rating process by the evaluator. We tested this method with 10 engineering designers and three different design tasks. Our results revealed that SCAT ratings can be used as a proxy for measuring design concepts but there are modifications that could enhance its utility. This work contributes to our understanding of how to evaluate creativity after idea generation and provides a framework for further research in this field.

scholarly journals Effects of Multidisciplinary Participatory Design Method on Students’ Engineering Design Process

Eng ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-121
Author(s):  
Yu-Hung Chien ◽  
Chun-Kai Yao ◽  
Yu-Han Chao
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Participatory Design ◽  
Sequential Analysis ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Teaching Model ◽  
Engineering Design Process ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
Experimental Group

This study took the ergonomics design course as an example to propose a design teaching model of multidisciplinary participatory design (MPD), and investigated the effects of this teaching model on the engineering design behavior of college students. We used lag behavior sequential analysis to compare the design behaviors of three student groups: a participatory design (PD) experimental group, an MPD experimental group, and a control group. The results of the study show that (1) students in the PD experimental group had 13 significant sequential engineering design behaviors, students in the MPD experimental group had 10, and students in the control group had only seven. The engineering design behaviors of the experimental groups were more diversified than those of the control group. (2) The three groups of students had a small number of significant design behavior transfers in the engineering design process, indicating that the students’ sequential design behaviors between two different design activities were insufficient. We concluded by detailing the pros and cons of using the MPD teaching model based on the results of this study, and hopefully by providing a reference for teaching engineering design.

The Impact of Team-Based Product Dissection on Design Novelty

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Gül E. Okudan Kremer
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Current Design ◽  
The Impact

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome steps often included in these methods, which limit the practicality and adoption of these methods. This study seeks to understand the impact of product dissection, a design method widely utilized in academia and industry, on design novelty in order to produce recommendations for the use or alterations of this method for supporting novelty in design. To investigate the impact of dissection, a study was conducted with 76 engineering students who completed a team-based dissection of an electric toothbrush and then individually generated ideas. The relationships between involvement in the dissection activity, the product dissected, the novelty and quantity of the ideas developed were investigated. The results reveal that team members who were more involved in the dissection activity generated concepts that were more novel than those who did not. In addition, the type of the dissected product also had an influence on design novelty. Finally, a positive correlation between the number of ideas generated and the novelty of the design concepts was identified. The results from this study are used to provide recommendations for leveraging product dissection for enhancing novelty in engineering design education and practice.

Development and Application of a Patent-Based Design Around Process

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yeh-Liang Hsu ◽  
Po-Er Hsu ◽  
Yung-Chieh Hung ◽  
Ya-Dan Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Patent Analysis ◽  
Patent Infringement ◽  
Design Matrix ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Patent Information ◽  
Design Methodologies ◽  
Function Matrix

This research proposes a patent-based design process by systematically integrating patent information, the rules of patent infringement judgment, strategies of designing around patents, and innovation design methodologies. The purpose of the process is to systematically generate new design concepts that are local variations of one of the concerned patents but does not infringe with existing patents. The basic idea is to consider patent infringement before engineering design concepts are actually generated. In this process, first the designer conducts standard patent analysis to identify the related patents to be designed around. Each patent is then symbolized by a “design matrix” converted from the technology/function matrix of the patent. A design-around algorithm is developed to generate a new design matrix that does not infringe with design matrices of existing patents. Then the new design matrix is transformed back into a real engineering design using the “contradiction matrix” in TRIZ. A computerized design-around tool based on the innovative patent-based design process is also developed.

scholarly journals Involving Students in the Instructional Design Process to Improve Their Satisfaction with Their Learning in the COVID-19 Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 410-415
Author(s):  
Ryane Imane ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Distance Learning ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
School Closure ◽  
First Year ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Instructional Design Process ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Students Satisfaction

Like most university students worldwide, the engineering students at the School of Information Sciences (ESI) have to deal with their school closure and the new paradigm of distance learning. Despite efforts made by the administration and the teachers to accompany students, an internal survey conducted by the end of October 2021 revealed that almost all students, especially first-year ones, did not accept distance learning. This paper describes our experience to improve students’ satisfaction with distance learning by involving them in their courses’ design process. Four courses were concerned by the experience and were designed following the ADDIE method. Last-year students participated in the ADDIE analysis step, while the first-year students participated in the last step by evaluating the co-created courses. Courses were co-created with students as most of them got involved in the ADDIE development step and enriched courses by realizing extras activities. Results showed that students were highly satisfied with courses taught in the context of this study.

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