Ade Mabogunje

Developing a visual representation to characterize moment-to-moment concept generation in design teams

Concept generation, an activity in which a number of design concepts are generated for further evaluation through prototyping and testing, is an important stage in the engineering design process. In design practice and design education, concept generation is often conducted in teams. During this activity, designers interact with one another to generate a number of design concepts. Prior research has either looked into the inter-relations between concepts generated, or into identifying specific interpersonal response behaviors in teams. There is a lack of explanation of how design concepts are generated moment-to-moment from the interpersonal interactions between designers. This paper presents the development of a visual notation called the Interaction Dynamics Notation for representing moment-to-moment concept generation through interpersonal interactions. This notation was developed through a video-observation study conducted with two engineering design teams engaged in a concept generation activity. Collective improvization was used to bridge concept generation and interpersonal behaviors into a single point of view for developing the notation. The validity of the notation is discussed in comparison with Linkography. The notation is shown to be effective in revealing patterns of interaction previously unfamiliar to design research.

210-NP: measuring the mechanical engineering design process

The grades assigned at quarterly intervals to 10 projects in a project-based mechatronics systems design class named ME210 were plotted alongside the number of distinct noun phrases (NPs) in the project reports. It was found that the grades were strongly associated (gamma>0.7) with the number of distinct NPs, while they were weakly associated with other variables, like readability and the number of words. These initial results open up a new set of ways for assessing design work and, as a consequence, improving the performance of students doing design tasks.

A Structure for Design Theory

The field of engineering design research is being pulled into two opposing directions—toward scientific rigor on one hand, and a greater relevance for professional practice on the other. The development of design theories in the field reflects this dichotomy. We have formal design theories deriving from mathematical roots that rarely influence the practice. And we have a plethora of process models that serve as scaffolds for professional designing, but lack scientific validity. Can we create design theory that resolves this dichotomy and displays scientific rigor while being useful to professionals? In this chapter, we propose a structure for design theory that attempts to answer this question. Building on the structure of scientific theory from philosophy of science and the perception–action perspective from ethnographic research, we suggest a two-dimensional structure for design theory. The first dimension describes the theoretical constructs and relationships between them, and the second dimension provides the perceptual field and action repertoire that makes a theory relevant in situations of professional practice. We explain these two dimensions of design theory, while focusing on the second perception–action dimension that is our contribution to design research. We illustrate this by developing the perception–action dimension of C-K theory.

Diagnostics for Design Thinking Teams

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key requirement in the design thinking approach to innovation. The tools currently available for effective team coaching are limited to heuristics derived from either experienced design thinking professionals or clinical psychology practitioners. Our research aims to improve this current situation by providing design thinking managers, coaches and instructors a scientifically validated tool for augmenting design team performance. We present the development of a software tool called the IDN Tool based on the Interaction Dynamics Notation to analyze team interactions and diagnose patterns of behavior that influence design outcomes. We demonstrate the use of the IDN Tool through analysis of the interaction behaviors of seven design teams engaged in a concept generation activity, which were independently rated by a two-person Jury using the criteria of utility and novelty. Through the analysis we were able to visually isolate the interaction behaviors that had a high positive or negative correlation with the levels of novelty and utility of concepts judged a priori. With further work, this has the potential of improving in-process design team performance with a positive influence on design outcomes.

Developing Instrumentation for Design Thinking Team Performance

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key requirement in the design thinking approach to innovation. Previous research has shown that team coaching is an effective way to improve team performance. However, the tools currently available for effective team coaching are limited to heuristics derived from either experienced design thinking professionals or clinical psychology practitioners. Our research aims to improve this situation by providing design thinking managers, coaches, and instructors a reliable instrument for measuring design team performance. In this chapter, we present the underlying methodology for instrument design. The development of a specific diagnostic instrument, based on a visual notation called the Interaction Dynamics Notation, is explained in terms of both the workflow of data through the instrument and the exploratory studies conducted to design the instrument user interface.

Emotion in Engineering Design Teams

Knowledge that is relevant to the practice of engineering can be categorized into three domains. First is the knowledge of the natural world that we fashion into engineering artifacts. This includes knowledge domains such as physics, chemistry, biology, and thermodynamics. Second is the knowledge of processes that we may use to transform the natural world into engineered artifacts. These include various engineering design methods, production processes, and mathematical methods. The third is the knowledge of the humans creating and using the engineering artifacts. This involves understanding and improving how engineers perceive, think, and act individually or collectively, such as in teams or organizations, when they are engaged in the daily practice of engineering; and also understanding how the users of these artifacts perceive and interact with them in the course of their life cycle. This domain uses and synthesizes knowledge from other fields such as psychology, group work, cognitive science, sociology, and anthropology that focus on the human as a subject of study. However, it differs in one key respect from these fields in that its focus on the human is rooted in an engineering value system that seeks to understand in order to re-create artifacts and situations for the better. The study of emotion is an important part of the domain of humans creating and using engineering artifacts.

A framework for design engineering education in a global context

Abstract This paper presents a framework for teaching design engineering in a global context using innovative technologies to enable distributed teams to work together effectively across international and cultural boundaries. The Digital Libraries for Global Distributed Innovative Design, Education, and Teamwork (DIDET) Framework represents the findings of a 5-year project conducted by the University of Strathclyde, Stanford University, and Olin College that enhanced student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team-based design engineering projects, directly experiencing different cultural contexts and accessing a variety of digital information sources via a range of innovative technology. The use of innovative technology enabled the formalization of design knowledge within international student teams as did the methods that were developed for students to store, share, and reuse information. Coaching methods were used by teaching staff to support distributed teams and evaluation work on relevant classes was carried out regularly to allow ongoing improvement of learning and teaching and show improvements in student learning. Major findings of the 5-year project include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical, and cultural issues for successful eLearning implementations. The DIDET Framework encapsulates all the conclusions relating to design engineering in a global context. Each of the principles for effective distributed design learning is shown along with relevant findings and suggested metrics. The findings detailed in the paper were reached through a series of interventions in design engineering education at the collaborating institutions. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the pedagogical and the technological approaches.

Get a grip on sense-making and exploration dealing with complexity through serious play

This paper focuses on the relationships between complex problems, sense-making, and exploration. We argue that we increasingly face complex problems for which we do not yet have effective coping methods. We further argue that, given the nature of these problems, it is useful to explore the role of play and games as effective coping methods. Through play we can make sense of complex phenomena and explore features thereof. Games, and in particular online games, seem to provide interesting features for capturing and dealing with complex problems. However, we argue that the games are not yet matured enough to fit the requirements for coping with specific professional settings. This leads us to propose a framework that includes games as one of four mechanisms. The framework is tested in a professional case.

Towards a Conceptual Framework for Predicting Engineering Design Team Performance Based on Question Asking Activity Simulation

The product development process has undergone significant changes in the last two decades. Consumers have become more sophisticated in their choices, products have become more complex, and the barriers to entry to competitors have been significantly lowered. All this has resulted in an increased emphasis on creative teamwork and shorter product development times. In turn this has led to an increased number of descriptive studies of the engineering design process in the research community as well as the development of various tools and methods aimed at improving the process. Success in this endeavor has been a difficult battle for the research community and several authors have made attempts to analyze the obstacles responsible for the difficulty. Blessing for example notes: “... identifying whether this [a method or tool] indeed contributes to success is far more difficult and the results are not easy to generalize. Success is difficult to measure other than in a real, industrial situation and action research in an industrial situation is notoriously difficult, let alone comparative action research. Furthermore, the success of a method or tool depends on the context in which it is being used. This context is different for every design process, because every design project is unique” (Blessing et al. 1998).

Taking atomic force microscope advances to the university classroom

Because of the current and future importance of the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) in education and research, our team has been working on transferring this technology to the college classroom. In this paper we present the initial findings of a case study in which two years of cutting-edge AFM research was transferred to the college classroom in the form of a one-semester course. The course was developed before the research was completed and published in final form. While, the course centered on the re-creation and explanation of the most recent advances in building high-throughput AFMs, it also implemented and assessed the use of two online AFMs. Student response to the initial course offering, its content, and the tools used, was very positive. The students rated the course above the department average on 14 of the 15 survey metrics and claimed that the teaching method would help them remember more than other classes (average 8 on a ten-point scale. N=24). As a result of the course, several students have shown interest in pursuing work and research in this field. These results indicate that the course has successfully broadened the horizons of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Nevada Reno, which had no microtechnology or AFM course offering prior to this work. It has also demonstrated the potential of using the AFM as the center focus of a MEMS/Nano-technology course. Finally, this case study may serve as a model for future technology transfer to the classroom by Ph.D. candidates who have not fully completed their technical research.