Human-Centered Support of Education in Design Problem Solving

PROgraming LAnguages for MAnufacTuring, 1998

Engineers are experts who collaborate in the process of designing required or desirable artefacts. To that effect, they need to communicate design information to one another in the same organisation, with engineers in other organisations, or indeed to themselves. Engineers mak.e use of models that best fit their respective discipline. Traditional design representations have weil understood limitations, which can impair communication. Hence, improved representations are required to better support engineering design. Design support systems are instrumental in either the development or evaluation of design representations. This paper outlines and reviews various types of design support systems. A presentation of design models is then given and the advantages and disadvantages of these models in supporting engineering design are discussed.

Computer-aided Engineering Journal, 1983

Engineering designers require effective means of collecting, storing, retrieving, processing, communicating, distributing, displaying, plotting and printing large quantities of information. The revolution in computer technology has led to the large-scale adoption of computer-based tools for these purposes. Furthermore, the technology is still developing and will soon provide intelligent knowledge-based systems. The implications for design methods and for the education of designers are of the utmost importance.

Volume 3a: 16th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, 2004

Many researchers have identified engineering design representation as a central issue for design research and design automation development. Despite this identification, there is still no common agreement on a framework for classifying and describing representation in engineering design. A framework for classifying representations in engineering design is presented here that is based upon the vocabulary, structure, expression, purpose, and abstraction. Examples are used to illustrate the application of this framework. Finally, this framework is compared to other partial representation classifications found in the literature. The framework discussed here enables design researchers, design practitioners, and design students to compare design representation approaches thereby supporting the selection of appropriate representations and models for various design tasks and automation.

27

2004

This paper aims to define a framework for the teaching and learning of undergraduate students in mechanical design. Training students in mechanical engineering design involves teaching both design methods and tools, and their usage in projects. Students should then consider and apply these methods and tools in product design projects. The paper is developed as follow. The relevant part of the curriculum of the mechanical engineering and design department of the Technological University of Grenoble (INPG) is first described and particularly the key element, the engineering project, is presented. A theoretical framework based on the instrument concept is then described. This framework is applied to observed design project situations to analyse practices and finally to propose new training situations enabling students to better use taught methods and tools to design efficiently.

2011

Engineering design involves insightful identification of factors influencing a system and systematic unpacking of specifications/requirements from goals. However, many engineering students are slow to articulate the major problems to be solved and the sub problems associated with achieving the main design goals and constraints. Prior research in design describes students" premature termination of solution finding to select a single idea. Then all other design decisions are constrained by this initial decision [1]. In this paper, we report how first-year engineering (FYE) students attempted to translate given design goals into sub-problems to be solved or questions to be researched. We found that, instead of decomposing the problem through further analysis and sense making, many FYE students tended to "restate" the goal, identify one major function, and then use hands on building as the central creative process. Further, students claimed they used a systematic design process, but observations of their problem solving process and teaming skills indicated a different behavior. Further investigation indicated that many FYE students could identify the superficial features from the problem statement, but they were not able to identify the implicit logical steps or deep structure of the problem. Our current data provided the baseline of how FYE students abstract and interpret information from a design goal to generate a specific problem statement. We are interested in treatments to improve students" ability to recognize critical features of a given context and encourage taking multiple perspectives to identify alternative solutions. We are combining the use of graphical representational tools as organizational tools to support teams collaboration and we encourage opportunities to reflect and refine their design process. This research is relevant to engineering instructors/researchers who want to develop students" ability to deal with complex design challenges and efficiently decompose, analyze and translate the problem statements into meaningful functional specifications, stakeholder requirements and a plan of action.

JOURNAL …, 2007

2005 Annual Conference Proceedings

Engineering textbooks have traditionally introduced students to engineering design by way of a block diagram. Although these diagrams vary slightly from one textbook to the next, the iconic diagram encloses each stage of the process in a block and depicts flow through the stages using arrows, typically double-ended to signify iteration between phases. Figure 1 is one example of the linear depiction of the engineering design process popularized in textbooks over the last several decades (Dixon, 1 as cited in Bucciarelli, 2 p.92). The number of stages in these diagrams has ranged up to several dozen (see, for example, Woodson 3), depending on the detail and complexity with which the design process is rendered. In a content analysis of seven introductory engineering design textbooks, Moore and Atman 4 and their colleagues synthesized the texts' depictions into a six-step model: 1.

… (EDC'02), King's College, London, UK, 2002

This paper describes research that combines a generic decision-making model, together with design strategies employed by experienced engineering designers. The relationship between the decision-making activities and the eight design strategies are examined. By combining these two understandings of the design process, a model has been developed, which describes the different types of decision-making activities made during the design process together with strategies that aid the designer in making decisions.