Analysis of Engineering Design Journal Sketches and Notations

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley L. Grenier ◽  
Linda C. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Undergraduate Research ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
University Of Maryland ◽  
Time Commitment ◽  
Coding Schemes ◽  
Journal Entries

Identifying and transferring secrets of engineering design drive innovation within a successful company. In design courses, engineering students rarely use a lab book, a research notebook, or design journal to document anything! During the summer of 2006, a University of Maryland RISE undergraduate research team piloted a study of 12 students’ design journal entries during a Mechanical Engineering senior Capstone design course. Existing note coding schemes from the engineering education researchers were adapted and tested with the goal of inferring cognitive activity. Journal entries revealed individual characteristics about students as learners including: uneven time commitment to design stages, preference for sketching, documentation clarity and individual buy-in to design tools presented in class. Design journal research is a promising path to understanding how students are learning and practicing design.

Internet Design Studio

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Design Studio ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Virtual Design ◽  
Internet In Education ◽  
Internet Design

In most instances engineering design courses are offered during the senior year of the undergraduate curriculum. These senior level design courses allow the students to apply different engineering concepts to design a product, with the expectation of preparing engineering students for a distributed and global workplace. Another possible alternative is to provide a simulated education environment where students can design products in a distributed and collaborative environment. The use of Internet in education has opened the possibility to explore and adopt new approaches to teach distributed collaborative engineering design and analysis. The Internet Design Studio, presented in this paper, tries to fulfill this need. In the Internet Design Studio each student is provided with a virtual design studio space for each project. The design studio spaces can be imagined as a virtual space containing design tools, applications, software and theoretical materials that facilitates students to design and perform analysis. Conceptually, a student enters the studio space and grabs appropriate tools to perform different design tasks. The design tools in the Internet Design Studio are web-based and support collaborations by allowing multiple users to view, discuss, create and utilize same models of the product to perform analysis. In this paper the framework of the Internet Design Studio is presented. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated through the use of several multi-designer collaborative design tools.

Feeling the Heat! Exploring the Relationship Between Students’ Empathy, Attitudes Towards Sustainability, and Their Identification of Problem Requirements

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Prabhu ◽  
Mohammed Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Elizabeth Starkey
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Sustainable Design ◽  
Primary User ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Trait Empathy ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract As global resources deplete, there has emerged a need for designers to emphasize sustainability in engineering design. Towards this end, several researchers have presented design tools to support sustainable design; however, designers must be encouraged to adopt a sustainable design mindset and actively utilize these design tools and techniques in the design process. Prior research has identified the need for interpersonal skills such as empathy among individuals to encourage an active sustainable mindset among them. While several researchers have demonstrated the relationship between designers’ empathy and their identification of problem requirements in engineering design, little research has explored this relationship in the context of sustainable design. This direction of research is particularly important as environment-focused decisions in engineering design do not always benefit the primary user of a solution, but often affect secondary and tertiary stakeholders. Our aim in this paper is to explore this research gap through an experimental study with undergraduate engineering students. Specifically, we compared the relationship between participants’ trait empathy and their attitudes towards sustainability, in the context of environmental sustainability. We then investigated the relationship between their trait empathy, attitudes towards sustainability, and their identification of problem requirements in a design task. From the results, we see that students’ intentions towards sustainable actions positively correlated with their identification of environment-focused requirements. On the other hand, students’ perspective-taking — a component of their trait empathy — positively correlated with their identification of user-focused requirements. These findings provide an important first step towards understanding the relationship between designers’ individual differences and their adoption of sustainability in engineering design.

A Pillar of Mechanical Engineering Design Education in Australia: 25 Years of the Warman Design and Build Competition

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren F. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Student Assessment ◽  
National Committee ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Institutional Learning ◽  
History Of

The “Warman Design and Build Competition”, running across Australasian Universities, is now in its 26th year in 2013. Presented in this paper is a brief history of the competition, documenting the objectives, yearly scenarios, key contributors and champion Universities since its beginning in 1988. Assuming the competition has reached the majority of mechanical and related discipline engineering students in that time, it is fair to say that this competition, as a vehicle of the National Committee on Engineering Design, has served to shape Australasian engineering education in an enduring way. The philosophy of the Warman Design and Build Competition and some of the challenges of running it are described in this perspective by its coordinator since 2003. In particular, the need is for the competition to work effectively across a wide range of student group ability. Not every group engaging with the competition will be competitive nationally, yet all should learn positively from the experience. Reported also in this paper is the collective feedback from the campus organizers in respect to their use of the competition as an educational experience in their classrooms. Each University participating uses the competition differently with respect to student assessment and the support students receive. However, all academic campus organizer responses suggest that the competition supports their own and their institutional learning objectives very well. While the project scenarios have varied widely over the years, the intent to challenge 2nd year university (predominantly mechanical) engineering students with an open-ended statement of requirements in a practical and experiential exercise has been a constant. Students are faced with understanding their opportunity and their client’s value system as expressed in a scoring algorithm. They are required to conceive, construct and demonstrate their device with limited prior knowledge and experience, and the learning outcomes clearly impact their appreciation for teamwork, leadership and product realization.

Can Induced Gratitude Improve Creative Performance on Repurposing Tasks?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Natalie M. Sisson ◽  
Emily Impett ◽  
L.H. Shu
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Full Study ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
First Time

Abstract Urgent societal problems, including climate change, require innovation and can benefit from interdisciplinary solutions. A small body of research has demonstrated the potential of positive emotions (e.g., gratitude, awe) to promote creativity and prosocial behavior, which may help address these problems. This study integrates, for the first time, psychology research on a positive and prosocial emotion (i.e., gratitude) with engineering-design creativity research. In a pre-registered study design, engineering students and working engineers (pilot N = 49; full study N = 329) completed gratitude, positive-emotion control, or neutral-control inductions. Design creativity was assessed through rater scores of responses to an Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and a Wind-Turbine-Blade Repurposing Task (WRT). No significant differences among AUT scores emerged across conditions in either sample. While only the pilot-study manipulation of gratitude was successful, WRT results warrant further studies on the effect of gratitude on engineering-design creativity. The reported work may also inform other strategies to incorporate prosocial emotion to help engineers arrive at more original and effective concepts to tackle environmental sustainability, and in the future, other problems facing society.

Development of a DSM-Based Methodology in an Academic Setting

2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Platanitis ◽  
Remon Pop-Iliev ◽  
Ahmad Barari
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Design Structure ◽  
Academic Settings ◽  
Task Durations ◽  
Random Disturbances ◽  
Process Convergence ◽  
Work Transformation

This paper proposes the use of a design structure matrix/work transformation matrix (DSM/WTM)-based methodology in academic settings to serve engineering educators as a facilitating tool for predetermining the difficulty and feasibility of design engineering projects they assign, given both the time constraints of the academic term and the expected skill level of the respective learners. By using a third-year engineering design project as a case study, engineering students actively participated in this comprehensive use of DSM methodologies. The engineering design process has been thoroughly analyzed to determine convergence characteristics based on the eigenvalues of the system followed by a sensitivity analysis on the originally determined DSM based on data provided by students in terms of task durations and number of iterations for each task. Finally, an investigation of the design process convergence due to unexpected events or random disturbances has been conducted. The obtained predictive model of the design process was compared to the actual dynamics of the project as experienced by the students and the effect of random disturbances at any point in the design process has thereby been evaluated.

scholarly journals PRODUCT CIRCULARITY INDICATORS: WHAT CONTRIBUTIONS IN DESIGNING FOR A CIRCULAR ECONOMY?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 2129-2138
Author(s):  
M. Saidani ◽  
H. Kim ◽  
F. Cluzel ◽  
Y. Leroy ◽  
B. Yannou
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Circular Economy ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Industrial Product ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis paper investigates and questions the relevance of product-centric circularity indicators in a product design context. To do so, reviews of eco-design tools and critical analyses of circularity indicators at the micro level of circular economy implementation are combined with a new workshop experimenting four of these indicators with the aim to improve the circularity performance of an industrial product. On this basis, the four tool-based circularity indicators tested are mapped on the engineering design and development process, and are positioned among the pool of main eco-design tools.

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