Back to list of seminars for 2006/07
How do engineering student and expert practitioners solve engineering design problems? How do these two groups' design processes compare to each other? Do engineering faculty design processes resemble either their students' processes or their colleagues in industry?
In this talk I will describe the engineering design processes used by a sample of 73 individuals who solved a 2-to-3 hour lab-based design problem. The sample includes 26 first-year and 24 fourth-year engineering students, 19 expert engineering practitioners and 4 engineering faculty members. I will present timeline representations of design activities the subjects engaged in as they solved the problem. I will also compare their performance using metrics such as the quality of the problem solution, the amount of time spent in various activities, and the amount and type of information they gathered. The findings from this work have interesting links to current research in the field that will be explored in the talk.