Ozgur Eris

Engineering design thinking, teaching, and learning

This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning.

Hands-Free Image Capture, Data Tagging and Transfer Using Google Glass: A Pilot Study for Improved Wound Care Management

Chronic wounds, including pressure ulcers, compromise the health of 6.5 million Americans and pose an annual estimated burden of

Question asking in design reviews: how does inquiry facilitate the learning interaction?

25 billion to the U.S. health care system. When treating chronic wounds, clinicians must use meticulous documentation to determine wound severity and to monitor healing progress over time. Yet, current wound documentation practices using digital photography are often cumbersome and labor intensive. The process of transferring photos into Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) requires many steps and can take several days. Newer smartphone and tablet-based solutions, such as Epic Haiku, have reduced EMR upload time. However, issues still exist involving patient positioning, image-capture technique, and patient identification. In this paper, we present the development and assessment of the SnapCap System for chronic wound photography. Through leveraging the sensor capabilities of Google Glass, SnapCap enables hands-free digital image capture, and the tagging and transfer of images to a patient’s EMR. In a pilot study with wound care nurses at Stanford Hospital (n=16), we (i) examined feature preferences for hands-free digital image capture and documentation, and (ii) compared SnapCap to the state of the art in digital wound care photography, the Epic Haiku application. We used the Wilcoxon Signed-ranks test to evaluate differences in mean ranks between preference options. Preferred hands-free navigation features include barcode scanning for patient identification, Z(15) = -3.873, p < 0.001, r = 0.71, and double-blinking to take photographs, Z(13) = -3.606, p < 0.001, r = 0.71. In the comparison between SnapCap and Epic Haiku, the SnapCap System was preferred for sterile image-capture technique, Z(16) = -3.873, p < 0.001, r = 0.68. Responses were divided with respect to image quality and overall ease of use. The study’s results have contributed to the future implementation of new features aimed at enhancing mobile hands-free digital photography for chronic wound care.

Manifestation of Divergent-Convergent Thinking in Question Asking and Decision Making Processes of Design Teams: A Performance Dimension

Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom m.aurisicchio@imperial.ac.uk Abstract: Design reviews are common educational practice in design disciplines, where students meet with instructors and other stakeholders to discuss the progress of a project they are engaged in. Such reviews are tightly coupled with project-based learning approaches in the design studio. A number of research studies have looked into various characteristics of instructor-student interactions during design reviews. In this study, we investigated the question-asking behavior of instructors, students and clients. We paid particular attention to high-level questions that relate to causal and generative reasoning. We analyzed 22 reviews involving six undergraduate industrial designers, who undertook design projects individually. We observed that the instructors and clients were not effective in modeling question asking behavior for the students during the reviews. We also observed that the structure of the reviews did not facilitate the desired behavior either. Consequently, we present a theoretical framework that proposes a more explicit structure for design reviews, deliberately addressing particular aspects of the design process. Ultimately, we suggest that instructors should be inquisitive about the students’ design approach, and that the students should take responsibility for reflectively articulating their design thinking and actions during design reviews.

A Theoretical Approach to Intuition in Design: Does Design Methodology Need to Account for Unconscious Processes?

Designing is question intensive. However, our knowledge of the role of question asking in design is limited. The research presented in this article is a summary of the significant findings of a doctoral dissertation that addresses this limitation (Eris 2002). When the findings are considered together, they constitute the conceptual framework of a question-decision centric design thinking model.

A framework for design engineering education in a global context

Design theory is the body of knowledge that provides an understanding of the principles, practices, and procedures of design. That knowledge leads to hypotheses on how designers should work, which constitute the basis of the prescriptive part of design methodology. Decision making is one of the central design activities, and has been predominantly conceptualized as a structured, explicit, and rational thinking process in the literature. From this knowledge, various decision support methods have been developed. However, there is rich empirical evidence highlighting unconscious and mainly inaccessible processes that allow the designer to make quick and often effective decisions without building on explicit rationale. Given designers construct, apply, and internalize knowledge in a variety of different situations and time frames in their daily work, advocating the use of explicit and structured processes in all situations seems unrealistic. This claim implies that comprehensive design theories need to take into account unconscious processes such as intuition. From a methodological perspective, design methods should acknowledge the designer’s need to rely on intuition in certain situations—especially under time pressure. At a more advanced level, design methods should support the designer in assessing the limitations and benefits of utilizing intuitive approaches. In order to broaden the mono-disciplinary view, it would be beneficial to utilize knowledge from other disciplines such as relevant findings of neurophysiological research on the processes of the unconscious. For instance, in the early 1990s, neurophysiologists identified a group of nerve cells that are responsible for transmitting a signal when the brain detects an error before the person is even aware of the error. Connecting this type of information with the world of the designer might lead to advances in how designers relate to and manage their own processes.

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Impact of Digital Libraries on Engineering Design Learning

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.

Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research: Engineering Design Education

Engineering design is an information intensive activity. Right from need finding to final prototyping, designers are constantly acquiring, assimilating, transforming and giving out information. In fact in a design process, designers act as autonomous learners actively seeking and processing information. However, the mechanism by which information influences design learning is not well understood. This paper presents a conceptual framework for studying the impact of information resources on design learning based on a survey conducted on engineering students participating in a two-week long global collaborative design exercise to build bicycles out of paper materials.Copyright

Special session - academic pathways study: Special interactive session on findings and implications for engineering education and practice

Introduction Designing is a key component of professional practice in many fields of human endeavor (e.g., architecture, engineering, industrial design, art, and literature). For engineers, designing integrates engineering knowledge, skill, and vision in the pursuit of innovations to solve problems and enable modern life. With this understanding, engineering educators have, for several decades, been infusing their programs with design curricula and pedagogical experiences in order to enhance the design competencies of engineering graduates. Paralleling the development of these curricula and experiences, a growing body of research has been providing a scholarly basis for engineering design education. The goal of this chapter is to acquaint readers with engineering design education research and practice. To situate engineering design education in the larger context, we first present a brief history of research on design processes across several fields and then move to a more specific description of research on engineering design processes. We then focus on research that investigates effective ways to teach and assess the design process and review curricular structures and pedagogies that are commonly used in undergraduate engineering programs.

ConExSIR: A Dialogue-based Framework of Design Team Thinking and Discovery

The Academic Pathways Study (APS) is a mixed- methods longitudinal study of engineering students at four institutions. The goals of this special interactive session are to begin the processes of (1) knitting APS knowledge into the larger body of engineering education scholarship, and (2) develop ways of thinking about these findings that inform engineering education program planning and classroom practice.