AbstractWhile a significant amount of research has documented the importance of design artefacts in design communication, relatively little work has investigated the effect of design artefact quality on the development of a shared understanding between designers. In the current work we focus specifically on sketch quality and the effect of sketch quality on the shared understanding of design dyads. A controlled study with 22 design dyads (44 designers) was conducted to understand the relationship between sketch quality and shared understanding. Results suggest that design artefact quality, measured by sketch understandability, does not predict the shared understanding of a design concept. Our findings hold implications for the fundamental ways in which we evaluate sketch quality and the importance of artefact fidelity for communicative acts.

AbstractPrior work has demonstrated that gender identity affects team psychological safety, which is critical to the development of a shared understanding of the task. Further, we know that a shared understanding can increase team cohesion and team performance. Little work has investigated how gender differences affect communicative acts within the context of design, and more specifically how gender differences may affect the development of a shared understanding of the design concept between designers. As a first step towards filling this gap, the current work presents findings from a controlled study conducted at The Pennsylvania State University with 22 design dyads (44 designers). The findings from this study indicate that gender identity within design dyads does not affect participants’ shared understanding of a design concept.

Design representations play a crucial role in facilitating communication between individuals in design. Sketches and physical prototypes are frequently used to communicate design concepts in early-stage design. However, we lack an understanding of the communicative benefits each representation provides and how these benefits relate to the effort and resources required to create each representation. A mixed-methods study was conducted with 44 participants to identify whether sketches and physical prototypes led to different levels of cognitive load perceived by a communicator and listener and the characteristics that shape their cognitive load during communication. Results showed that listeners perceived higher levels of mental and physical demands when understanding ideas as low-fidelity physical prototypes, as compared to sketches. No significant differences were found in the cognitive load levels of communicators between the two conditions. Qualitative analyses of post-task semi-structured interviews identified five themes relating to verbal explanations and visual representations that shape designers’ cognitive load when understanding and communicating ideas through design representations. Results indicate that designers should be aware of the specific objectives they seek to accomplish when selecting the design representation used to communicate. This work contributes to the knowledge base needed for designers to use design representations more effectively as tools for communication.

Background During the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, universities rapidly pivoted to online formats and were often unable to adhere to the best practices of online learning highlighted in prior literature. It is well documented that a variety of barriers impeded "normal" educational practices. Purpose/Hypothesis The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions of first-year engineering students enrolled in an introductory engineering design course during the rapid transition to online working environments. We view students' perceptions through the theoretical lens of workplace thriving theory, a framework that allowed us to capture aspects of education required for students to thrive in non-optimum learning settings. Design/Method This research employed semi-structured interview methods with 13 students enrolled in an introductory engineering design course that relies on project-based team learning. We analyzed interview transcripts using thematic analysis through an abductive approach and made interpretations through workplace thriving theory. Results Results indicated that students' abilities to thrive are related to four intersecting themes that demonstrate how workplace thriving theory manifests in this unanticipated online setting. These themes demonstrate elements that must be optimized for students to thrive in settings such as this: relationships with others, building and sharing knowledge through interactions, perceptions of experiential learning, and individual behaviors. Conclusion Our research, viewed through workplace thriving theory, highlights the mechanisms by which students tried to succeed in suboptimal environments. While not all our participants showed evidence of thriving, the factors required for thriving point to opportunities to harness these same factors in in-person instruction environments.

Effective communication is an integral part of engineering design and leads to successful design outcomes. While there have been extensive calls to equip novice designers with effective communication skills, there is only a limited body of work that has attempted to characterize the communication patterns of novice designers, particularly when engaging with external audiences. This work seeks to characterize how the project type, or the nature of design problem, shapes the communicative patterns of novice designers when communicating design outcomes to external audiences. Presentations of design solutions from 46 teams were collected at the end of a semester-long capstone design program. These presentations were then characterized as industry- and human-centered projects. Analysis was conducted using topic modeling and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis to identify differences in linguistic patterns of novice designers between the two project types. Contrary to prior findings, no significant differences were found, implying that the communication patterns of novice designers are not affected by the type of project (or design problem being solved).

Measuring walking speed is becoming a more useful tool for assessing overall patient health along with the other five vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiratory rate, and pain. Clinicians consider walking speed to be the “sixth vital sign”. Standardization in measuring walking speed remains elusive and current methods may lead to inconsistent and inaccurate results. This study focused on testing an interface prototype that provides the user with a record-based platform for analyzing walking speed. Two usability studies were conducted with two separate iterations of interfaces. This paper focuses on the second interface, which was a refined version of the first interface. Data obtained through usability metrics and verbal protocol analyses (VPAs) was analyzed. Results from this study provided suggestions for improving the second interface’s ease of use and overall task interaction. Future work will address improving the interface prototype and converting it to a fully-programmed version.

Communication with external audiences is a critical task within the design process. Yet, we lack fundamental knowledge about how designers communicate design solutions and decisions to such audiences. This is particularly problematic for novice designers, as without such knowledge, we cannot develop pedagogical interventions to train novices as effective communicators. In this work, we study two strategies used by novices to communicate design knowledge e argumentation and prototypes. Through a move analysis and Markov modelling, we identified six unique rhetorical moves and how novices transitioned between them. We also identified several justifications and rhetorical devices used by novices that were driven by prototyping efforts. Educators can utilize these results to support students in scaffolding communication skills to develop design communication expertise. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Prototyping plays a pivotal role in the engineering design process. Prototypes represent physical or digital manifestations of design ideas, and as such act as effective communication tools for designers. While the benefits of prototyping are well-documented in research, the fundamental ways in which the construction of a prototype affects designers' reflection on and evaluation of their design outcomes and processes are not well understood. The relationships between prototypes, designers' communication strategies, and recollection of design processes is of particular interest in this work, as preliminary research suggests that novice designers tend to struggle to clearly articulate the decisions made during the design process. This work serves to extend prior work and build foundational knowledge by exploring the evaluation of design outcomes and decisions, and communication strategies used by novice designers during prototyping tasks. A controlled in situ study was conducted with 45 undergraduate engineering students. Results from qualitative analyses suggest that a number of rhetorical patterns emerged in students' communications, suggesting that a complicated relationship exists between prototyping and communication.

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter provide new product developers with a novel and readily accessible platform to interact with potential customers, seek funding, and gain valuable feedback from target users. Successful startup design processes are often praised due to startups’ agility and ability to adapt to changing markets under extreme resource constraints. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the market in a number of significant ways, and publicly available data on Kickstarter provides valuable insight into the fundamental ways that product developers adapt to volatiles markets created by a global crisis. Leveraging linguistic analysis, topic modelling, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis, startup data was analyzed to identify overarching trends in startup launch campaigns across years. Specifically, this work identifies emerging trends in the Kickstarter market in 2020 to understand how external factors affect launch practices. Subtle yet significant changes in Kickstarter campaigns show that new clusters of campaigns emerged during 2020, not present in prior years, indicating that product developers adapted language to meet the needs of a changing market. Findings motivate a more thorough investigation of the relationships between startup market trends and external events to build a deeper understanding of the fundamental ways developers adapt design processes due to external stimuli.

AbstractPrototypes are critical design artifacts, and recent studies have established the ability of prototypes to facilitate communication. However, prior work suggests that novice designers often fail to perceive prototypes as effective communication tools, and struggle to rationalize design decisions made during prototyping tasks. To understand the interactions between communication and prototypes, design pitches from 40 undergraduate engineering design teams were collected and qualitatively analysed. Our findings suggest that students used prototypes to explain and persuade, aligning with prior studies of design practitioners. The results also suggest that students tend to use prototypes to justify design decisions and adverse outcomes. Future work will seek to understand novice designers’ use of prototypes as communication tools in further depth. Ultimately, this work will inform the creation of pedagogical strategies to provide students with the skills needed to effectively communicate design solutions and intent.

Abstract The purpose of this work is to investigate the relationship between the disciplinary diversity of capstone design teams and perceptions of success and engineering design abilities. Capstone design programs are effective environments for students to collaborate with industry sponsors on authentic design problems. They provide students with the opportunity to hone their technical and professional skills, often in teams. Previous work has demonstrated that interdisciplinary teams outperform within-discipline teams on complex open-ended tasks, but struggle to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. They also report lower levels of team cohesion and satisfaction with final outcomes. The results of the mixed-methods study conducted with 58 capstone design teams for this paper indicate that team diversity may be inversely related to students’ beliefs in their abilities to construct a prototype. Preliminary qualitative analysis suggests that students tend to divide prototyping tasks based on disciplinary background and struggle to integrate design efforts for complex systems, particularly during later stage design.

Despite continuous calls in literature for an increase in women in engineering, U.S. numbers hover around 20% women graduating with undergraduate degrees in engineering. Although diversity, inclusion, and engineering education researchers have made great strides in understanding the development of engineering identity and capturing the experiences of struggling women and underrepresented students, many women students still experience “chilly” climates in daily interactions in engineering education environments. Women need mentorship, peer support, and mastery experiences that build Self-leadership, resilience, and engineering self-efficacy beliefs to persevere and flourish in such environments. The current work explores the effectiveness of a novel experiential design intervention on these factors for women engineering students. Specifically, we assess the value of a unique experiential design course where women engineering students hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail guided by women engineering faculty members, and then participated in a follow-on design thinking project. Results suggest such interventions may be effective methods to improve student outcomes.