Browsing by Subject "Engineering Design"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Creating Effective Decision Aids for Complex Tasks
    (Usability Professionals' Association, 2008-08) Hayes, Caroline C.; Akhavi, Farnaz
    Engineering design tasks require designers to continually compare, weigh, and choose among many complex alternatives. The quality of these selection decisions directly impacts the quality, cost, and safety of the final product. Because of the high degree of uncertainty in predicting the performance of alternatives while they are still just sketches on the drawing board, and the high cost of poor choices, mathematical decision methods incorporating uncertainty have long held much appeal for product designers, at least from a theoretical standpoint. Yet, such methods have not been widely adopted in practical settings. The goals of this work are to begin understanding why this is so and to identify future questions that may lead to solutions. This paper summarizes the results of several studies by the authors: two laboratory studies in which we asked product designers to use various mathematical models to compare and select design alternatives, and a set of ethnographic studies in which we observed product designers as they worked so that we could better understand their actual practices and needs during decision making. Based on these studies, we concluded that the mathematical models, as formulated, are not well suited to designers’ needs and approaches. We propose a research agenda for developing new approaches that combine decision theoretic and usercentered methods to create tools that can make product designers’ decision making work easi
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    “Everything Would Have Worked If It Wasn’T For That Crap Mirror”: The Intersection Of Failure And Creativity In Integrated Stem Education
    (2023-05) Stretch, Elizabeth
    The sentiment that creativity is the most important skill needed to solve the problems that we face is repeated by different business and industry leaders around the world (Bronson & Merryman, 2010; NEA, n.d.; Nussbaum et al., 2005; Sammio, 2017). The call for creativity has been amplified in response to the problems and obstacles caused by COVID19. Yet, creativity remains the most neglected 21st century skill addressed in STEM education. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation was to develop strong conceptual connections between creativity and failure within an integrated STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) unit guided by the intersection of failure and creativity framework (IFCF; Stretch & Roehrig, 2021) through a qualitative case study design. Specifically, this study proposed to understand how the structure of an integrated STEM unit and the teacher’s role in implementation of the STEM unit may influence students’ use and application of creativity and learning from failure. The single case study was of a group of four sixth-grade boys engaged in addressing an engineering design challenge. Seven themes emerged from this research that inform the pedagogy and implementation of integrated STEM education. The following themes were identified through analysis of the small group discourse: (1) Creativity ensues in areas that are ill defined within engineering design problems, such as context; (2) As the design problem narrows (through specified content learning or overly defined context) students’ creativity narrows as well; (3) The potential of learning through failure is most prominent during the testing of the design solution; (4) The curricular focus on specific science content and the subsequent narrowing of context in engineering design problem scenarios created one possible design solution; (5) The sequence of lessons within a curriculum created a rigid linear progression through the engineering design process (EDP) with few opportunities for iteration; and (6) The teacher further constrained students’ creativity and ability to learn from failure through missed opportunities. This study provided empirical data to support the need for a modified engineering design process (EDP) utilized in integrated STEM units to promote creativity and innovation in problem solving in STEM.
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    Pitch Perfect: The Investigation of Presentation Quality Effect on Product Concept Evaluation
    (2019-10) Kwon, Jieun
    In New Product Development (NPD) process, designers and engineers work together to create product innovation. The concept selection stage is part of the early design process, in which stakeholders can come together to decide which idea is appropriate for further development. During the selection phase, the designers or engineers pitch their ideas to an audience, while the audience, who are investors, consumers, management, or peer designers, evaluate the idea based on the presentation. During this simple process, the audiences’ perception of the product idea is often influenced by the presentation quality. In this dissertation, the author examines if the quality of presentation can promote or overshadow the value of product ideas. With 3 different product ideas and 3 different presentations that differ in quality, this project demonstrates how a moderate idea that is presented well, can be seen as better than excellent ideas that are poorly presented. In addition, this study examines if the expertise of the viewer can weaken the presentation effect. The results indicate that the expertise on product design strengthens the presentation effect, yet whether product experts give higher scores or lower scores to the high-quality presentations is inconclusive.