DeLean Tolbert

Giving and responding to feedback through visualisations in design critiques

Abstract Designers develop skills and knowledge through experience and feedback – feedback from colleagues, clients, supervisors, users, stakeholders, or the success or failure of a solution and design instructors. However, the design coaches (instructors and industry clients) and design students must negotiate ambiguity in the feedback process. In this article, we investigate visualisation within a design critique setting, where the industrial design instructor and the students are navigating ambiguity while the instructor is providing feedback on the design work. Using a constitutive research approach, we investigate the relationships among visualisation, ambiguity and critique, where each of these components offers a lens into understanding how designers use the tensions within ambiguity and clarity to achieve designs that fulfil assignments or other purposes. As part of this process, we characterise differences between the ways the instructor and the student interact with the human and non-human agents. The negotiations of ambiguity among human and non-human agents through and within the constitutive processes of visualisation offers fresh insights into how design is accomplished as well as how visualisation can be expanded productively in design education contexts.

Knowledge transfer: Does more experience yield improved design quality?

Engineers must be able to transfer knowledge from previous experiences in order to solve complex engineering tasks. Transfer of knowledge is described as “the learning process involved when a person learns to use previously acquired knowledge, skills, competence, or expertise in a new situation” Therefore, we sought to explore how previous engineering, design, and mathematics experiences impact the quality of a design solution. In this study, 23 first-year engineering students, with diverse mathematics and design experiences, participated in research study. In this study, each student completed a pre-study survey, designed a playground for a fictitious neighborhood while thinking aloud, and completed an interview immediately after completing the playground task. They were asked to reflect on previous mathematics and design experiences and asked to make comparisons between those experiences and the design study they had just completed. The design session and the interview were recorded and the design artifacts were collected. Using Hailikaris model, the research team investigated the how knowledge transfer may impact design solution quality. The findings of the research have implications for approaches educators can use to help students apply knowledge from previous experiences and design high quality solutions.

Bridging the Gaps: Augmenting Design Learning Through Computer-Aided Exploration

In helping students learn engineering design, it is very important that they explore complex scenarios that are realistic, and fall outside the domain of standard and over-simplified textbook problems that typically have an answer. A majority of the current educational methods and computer-based tools do not bridge this gap and lack affordances for design exploration. Although computational methods such as Finite Element Analysis have this potential, they are hard to use requiring the users to spend a significant effort. Also, several instructors have identified significant knowledge gaps in concepts related to structural design and strength of materials when the students reach their senior year. To this end, we have developed a problem-based framework to allow for rapid design exploration within engineering design curricula using an easy-to-use, simplified and constrained version of finite elements for stress analysis and exploration. Our framework makes it possible for users to rapidly explore various design options by incorporating a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) backend for design exploration. Our approach uses a constrained design problem for weight minimization that incorporates elements of structural topology optimization but does not automate it. Instead we provide the user the control on decision making for changing the shape through material removal. Using this framework, we explore the decision making of users, and their methodology in the course of the activities that provide a context of control, challenge and reflection. Using video and verbal protocol analysis we integrate assessment in ways that are important and interesting for learning. Our framework demonstrates that the ability of computational tools that are transformed for learning purposes can scaffold and augment learning processes in new ways.Copyright

Development of non-cognitive skills in minority engineering outreach programs

A broad array of efforts have focused on multiplying student pathways to engineering, particularly for groups that have been historically under-represented such as ethnic minorities in the United States. Among such efforts, summer programs have been a widely used mechanism to stimulate and nurture engineering identity and agency in students from a relatively young age. At a large Midwestern University in the US, summer engineering workshops (SEWs) are executed for grades 6-12 to create awareness, increase student interest in engineering careers, enhance student preparation, and improve student access to resources required to pursue an engineering career. This paper presents an overview of the efforts of the aforementioned university to embed non-cognitive skills into the targeted learning outcomes of SEWs for secondary school students. These workshops range in duration from one to five weeks and the majority of instructors and staff are undergraduate and graduate students. Specifically, the paper outlines targeted non-cognitive learning outcomes and the elements designed to address them in 1) instructor/staff training and 2) workshop curriculum. Initial efforts will include the integration of active engagement strategies with the use of formative assessments and effective feedback tools as well as exposure to self-theories such as growth and fixed mindsets.