scholarly journals Measuring The Impact Of Component Functional Templates In A Sophomore Level Engineering Design Class

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Abbott ◽  
Katie Lough
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
The Impact

Quantifying the Impact of Domain Knowledge and Problem Framing on Sequential Decisions in Engineering Design

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Murtuza Shergadwala ◽  
Ilias Bilionis ◽  
Karthik N. Kannan ◽  
Jitesh H. Panchal
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Information Acquisition ◽  
Design Problem ◽  
Domain Knowledge ◽  
Optimization Problem ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Problem Framing ◽  
Design Solutions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Domain Independent

Many decisions within engineering systems design are typically made by humans. These decisions significantly affect the design outcomes and the resources used within design processes. While decision theory is increasingly being used from a normative standpoint to develop computational methods for engineering design, there is still a significant gap in our understanding of how humans make decisions within the design process. Particularly, there is lack of knowledge about how an individual's domain knowledge and framing of the design problem affect information acquisition decisions. To address this gap, the objective of this paper is to quantify the impact of a designer's domain knowledge and problem framing on their information acquisition decisions and the corresponding design outcomes. The objective is achieved by (i) developing a descriptive model of information acquisition decisions, based on an optimal one-step look ahead sequential strategy, utilizing expected improvement maximization, and (ii) using the model in conjunction with a controlled behavioral experiment. The domain knowledge of an individual is measured in the experiment using a concept inventory, whereas the problem framing is controlled as a treatment variable in the experiment. A design optimization problem is framed in two different ways: a domain-specific track design problem and a domain-independent function optimization problem (FOP). The results indicate that when the problem is framed as a domain-specific design task, the design solutions are better and individuals have a better state of knowledge about the problem, as compared to the domain-independent task. The design solutions are found to be better when individuals have a higher knowledge of the domain and they follow the modeled strategy closely.

scholarly journals How Concept Selection Tools Impact the Development of Creative Ideas in Engineering Design Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuan Zheng ◽  
Sarah C. Ritter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Student Teams ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Selection Tools

Concept selection tools have been heavily integrated into engineering design education in an effort to reduce the risks and uncertainties of early-phase design ideas and aid students in the decision-making process. However, little research has examined the utility of these tools in promoting creative ideas or their impact on student team decision making throughout the conceptual design process. To fill this research gap, the current study was designed to compare the impact of two concept selection tools, the concept selection matrix (CSM) and the tool for assessing semantic creativity (TASC) on the average quality (AQL) and average novelty (ANV) of ideas selected by student teams at several decision points throughout an 8-week project. The results of the study showed that the AQL increased significantly in the detailed design stage, while the ANV did not change. However, this change in idea quality was not significantly impacted by the concept selection tool used, suggesting other factors may impact student decision making and the development of creative ideas. Finally, student teams were found to select ideas ranked highly in concept selection tools only when these ideas met their expectations, indicating that cognitive biases may be significantly impeding decision making.

The Assessment of Product Archaeology as a Platform for Contextualizing Engineering Design

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemper Lewis ◽  
Deborah Moore-Russo ◽  
Phil Cormier ◽  
Andrew Olewnik ◽  
Gül Kremer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
National Network ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
Novel Approaches ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Pedagogical Innovations ◽  
Global World ◽  
The Impact

Many engineering departments struggle to meet “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” (Outcome h) that is required for ABET. As a result, engineering students receive meaningful contextual experiences in piecemeal fashion and graduate with a lack of concrete competencies that bridge knowledge and practice in the global world in which they will live and work. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, our product archaeology framework combines concepts from archaeology with advances in cyber-enhanced product dissection to implement pedagogical innovations that address the significant educational gap. In this paper, we focus on assessing elements of a sustainable and scalable foundation that can support novel approaches aimed at educating engineering students to understand the global, economic, environmental, and societal context and impact of engineering solutions. This foundation is being developed across a network of partner institutions. We present recent results from freshman, sophomore, and senior courses at two of the partners in the national network of institutions.

Helping Teams Expand the Breadth of Their Solution Space Through Product Dissection: A Simulation Based Investigation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Christopher McComb ◽  
Samuel T. Hunter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
First Year ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Simulation Based ◽  
The Impact

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education as a component of larger engineering design projects, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the goal of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on the breadth of the design space explored and the underlying influence of educational level on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 7,000 nominal brainstorming teams generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique that accounted for all possible team configurations. Specifically, each team was composed of four team members based on a design repository of 463 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering design students after a product dissection activity. The results of the study highlight that simulated senior engineering design teams explored a larger solution space than simulated first-year teams and that dissecting different types of products allowed for the exploration of a larger solution space for all of the teams. The results also showed that dissecting two analogically far and two simple products was most effective in expanding the solution space for simulated senior teams. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to most effectively deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to maximize the solution space explored.

The Consideration of Welding Profiles in Fatigue Evaluation of Structure Design

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Fatigue Life ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Structural Design ◽  
Structure Design ◽  
Offshore Platforms ◽  
Efficient Design ◽  
Structural Fatigue ◽  
Different Shapes ◽  
Fatigue Evaluation ◽  
The Impact

Structural fatigue plays a very important role in plating structural design. There are a lot of efforts in finding effective ways to improve the fatigue life of the plating structure. One of the means is to use welding profile. Welding profile is widely used in fatigue sensitive areas to improve the fatigue life of offshore platforms. How to evaluate the impact of welding profile to fatigue life calculation has always been the topic of engineering design. This paper will study the impact of different shapes of welding profiles to the fatigue life of structure through a real project example, and discuss its application in platform design. Different welding profiles have large impact on fatigue life; and an achievable good welding profile can improve the fatigue life dramatically. With the help of welding profiles, offshore engineers can achieve a more efficient design of the structure.

Evaluating the impact of Idea-Inspire 4.0 on analogical transfer of concepts

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Siddharth ◽  
Amaresh Chakrabarti
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Biological System ◽  
Biological Systems ◽  
Knowledge Bases ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Function Decomposition ◽  
Engineering Design Problems ◽  
Biological Domain ◽  
Biological Concepts ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe biological domain has the potential to offer a rich source of analogies to solve engineering design problems. However, due to the complexity embedded in biological systems, adding to the lack of structured, detailed, and searchable knowledge bases, engineering designers find it hard to access the knowledge in the biological domain, which therefore poses challenges in understanding the biological concepts in order to apply these concepts to engineering design problems. In order to assist the engineering designers in problem-solving, we report, in this paper, a web-based tool called Idea-Inspire 4.0 that supports analogical design using two broad features. First, the tool provides access to a number of biological systems using a searchable knowledge base. Second, it explains each one of these biological systems using a multi-modal representation: that is, using function decomposition model, text, function model, image, video, and audio. In this paper, we report two experiments that test how well the multi-modal representation in Idea-Inspire 4.0 supports understanding and application of biological concepts in engineering design problems. In one experiment, we use Bloom's method to test “analysis” and “synthesis” levels of understanding of a biological system. In the next experiment, we provide an engineering design problem along with a biological-analogous system and examine the novelty and requirement-satisfaction (two major indicators of creativity) of resulting design solutions. In both the experiments, the biological system (analogue) was provided using Idea-Inspire 4.0 as well as using a conventional text-image representation so that the efficacy of Idea-Inspire 4.0 is tested using a benchmark.

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