Learning Design through the Lens of Service: A Qualitative Study

Twenty-four senior-level capstone engineering design projects were completed at a large, public, primarily undergraduate university involving 85 students (70 male and 15 female). All projects involved the design of equipment to facilitate physical activity for people with disabilities. The effects on: i) learning design, ii) attitude towards people with disabilities, iii) motivation to complete team design projects and iv) interdisciplinary collaboration were analyzed through 24 one-hour focus groups. We explored the student experience using a constructivist approach and grounded theory. Four major themes (with associated sub-themes) emerged from our data analysis: learning design (project management, iterative design process, and user-centered design), motivation to complete design (engineering, disabilities, user), perceptions of people with disabilities (previous experience, changed attitudes and beliefs), and multidisciplinary collaboration (etiquette presentation, communication between disciplines, defining roles and expectations). Students completing these projects were shown to appreciate user-centered design, exhibit greater motivation when able to meet and develop a relationship with their client in person, discuss altruistic factors regarding their capstone experience, and were able to develop strong multidisciplinary skills

Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education

Design Thinking as a Framework for Teaching Packaging Innovation

Students in scientific/technical-oriented disciplines struggle with achieving good levels of innovation when exposed to design problems. Research indicates the need for implementing alternative pedagogical approaches in technical curricula that enhance students’ creative skills. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the implementation of a cross-disciplinary pedagogical approach with a focus on teaching innovation in the field of packaging engineering at a university in the United States. A Design Thinking Project-Based Learning (DTPBL) approach was used to improve the levels of innovation in student work. Its outcomes were compared with those of a Traditional Project-Based Learning (TPBL) approach. The implementation of DTPBL across several courses took place between 2015 and 2018. TPBL was the norm in these courses between 2009 and 2014. National and international student design competitions were used to assess the level of innovation of student work externally. Statistically significant differences were found in the levels of innovation of student work between approaches. DTPBL projects placed higher in design competitions, and they were recognized more often by independent expert judges than TPBL projects. At a national level, TPBL generated 172 projects in 11 instances, obtaining 12 awards. DTPBL produced 61 projects in seven instances, and student work was recognized with 21 awards. At a global level, student work created with TPBL was never recognized, while student projects generated using DTPBL received seven recognitions in three participation instances. This study provides evidence that a Design Thinking Project-Based Learning (DTPBL) approach can be a successful pedagogical strategy to enhance students’ creative skills and produce innovative design solutions

Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Programs: Multidisciplinary Projects with Homes in Any Discipline

A survey of papers in the ASEE Multidisciplinary Engineering Division over the last three years shows three main areas of emphasis: individual courses; profiles of specific projects; and capstone design courses. However, propagating multidisciplinary education across the vast majority of disciplines offered at educational institutions with varying missions requires models that are independent of the disciplines, programs, and institutions in which they were originally conceived. Further, models that can propagate must be cost effective, scalable, and engage and benefit participating faculty. Since 2015, a consortium of twenty-four institutions has come together around one such model, the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program. VIP unites undergraduate education and faculty research in a team-based context, with students earning academic credits toward their degrees, and faculty and graduate students benefitting from the design/discovery efforts of their multidisciplinary teams. VIP integrates rich student learning experiences with faculty research, transforming both contexts for undergraduate learning and concepts of faculty research as isolated from undergraduate teaching. It provides a rich, cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable model for multidisciplinary project-based learning. (1) It is rich because students participate multiple years as they progress through their curriculum; (2) It is cost-effective since students earn academic credit instead of stipends; (3) It is scalable because faculty can work with teams of students instead of individual undergraduate research fellows, and typical teams consist of fifteen or more students from different disciplines; (4) It is sustainable because faculty benefit from the research and design efforts of their teams, with teams becoming integral parts of their research. While VIP programs share key elements, approaches and implementations vary by institution. This paper shows how the VIP model works across sixteen different institutions with different missions, sizes, and student profiles. The sixteen institutions represent new and long-established VIP programs, varying levels of research activity, two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), and two international universities1. Theses sixteen profiles illustrate adaptability of the VIP model across different academic settings

Can Diversity Be Intersectional? Inclusive Business Planning and Accessible Web Design Internationally on Two Continents and Three Campuses

This paper describes a three-way, international pedagogical collaboration among three instructors—one from Hungary and two from Michigan and Washington in the United States —aimed at cultivating curricular diversity and inclusion. During this one-semester project, Michigan students from a Business Communication class collaboratively created a website based on an entrepreneurial business plan developed by students in a Business English class in Hungary. Both Michigan and Hungary students received advice from graduate students from a disability and accessibility course in Washington on how to make businesses inclusive of disabled customers and design accessible websites. This workplace simulation project primarily employed emails to engage in this collaboration and interact among students due to the location of the classes in three time zones and in two countries with major linguistic variations. Early results show that the collaborative project was successful in teaching intercultural communication skills and in increasing awareness of disability and accessibility

An empirical study of the “prototype walkthrough”: a studio-based activity for HCI education

For over a century, studio-based instruction has served as an effective pedagogical model in architecture and fine arts education. Because of its design orientation, human-computer interaction (HCI) education is an excellent venue for studio-based instruction. In an HCI course, we have been exploring a studio-based learning activity called the prototype walkthrough, in which a student project team simulates its evolving user interface prototype while a student audience member acts as a test user. The audience is encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback. We have observed that prototype walkthroughs create excellent conditions for learning about user interface design. In order to better understand the educational value of the activity, we performed a content analysis of a video corpus of 16 prototype walkthroughs held in two HCI courses. We found that the prototype walkthrough discussions were dominated by relevant design issues. Moreover, mirroring the justification behavior of the expert instructor, students justified over 80 percent of their design statements and critiques, with nearly one-quarter of those justifications having a theoretical or empirical basis. Our findings suggest that PWs provide valuable opportunities for students to actively learn HCI design by participating in authentic practice, and provide insight into how such opportunities can be best promoted

Assessing Design Thinking through the Activation of A Social Challenge in Higher Education: An Academic Inquiry

This thesis is an inquiry that documents, identifies and assesses the effectiveness, circumstances, and potential resources related to addressing the gap between social needs and higher education as stated in the National Development Strategy 2011-2016. The aim of the thesis is to evaluate the response of the students on the collaborative, human-centered, result-oriented aspects of design thinking while addressing the eating experience topic, an articulated theme from the wicked problem of obesity. The eating experience theme provided students from design, business and engineering majors a contextualized topic to test design thinking in a series of workshops conducted in three different universities. Quantitative research methods were used to test the students’ feedback on design thinking, map their reactions during the process and rate the workshops. The later served as a recruitment channel to bring interested students from design, business and engineering majors in a last workshop. Participants develop one of the previously generated seed concepts and reflect on the multi-disciplinary experience. Results have shown that students successfully articulated the method, focused on the user-needs, collaborated with each other and generated tangible seed concepts to address the social topic. The interior design students assessed the method with an average rating. They were the least comfortable with the ambiguity level of the topic and with the user-centered approach of design thinking. Whereas the engineering and business students rated the method with high scores and were comfortable in the workshops. Furthermore, 22% of the students involved in the study were interested to enroll in the last multi-disciplinary workshop yet 5% participated due to their workload and the lack of incentives. In conclusion, the inquiry engaged students in a transformative academic experience that impacted their cognitive and ethical capacity. It also revealed new opportunities that can bridge the gap between higher education and social needs

Bringing Human Factor to Business Intelligence

Trabalho apresentado em 11th INEKA Conference, 11-13 junho 2019, Verona, ItáliaStarting from Business Intelligence (BI) reference models, this work proposes to extend the multi-dimensional data modeling approach to integrate Human Factors (HF) related dimensions. The overall goal is to promote a fine grain understanding of derived Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) through an enhanced characterization of the operational level of work context. HF research has traditionally approached critical domains and complex socio-technical systems with a chief consideration of human situated action. Grounded on a review of the body of knowledge of the HF field this work proposes the Business Intelligence for Human Factors (BI4HF) framework. It intends to provide guidance on pertinent data identification, collection methods, modeling and integration within a BI project endeavor. BI4HF foundations are introduced and a use case on a manufacturing industry organization is presented. The outcome of the enacted BI project referred in the use case allowed new analytical capabilities regarding newly derived and existing KPIs related to operational performance.N/

A Radically Assembled Design-Engineering Education Program with a Selection and Combination of Multiple Disciplines

A radically assembled design-engineering program in the school of Design and Human Engineering (DHE) at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), newly founded in 2009, is presented. The most distinctive feature in DHE is that all students are required to select two disciplines for their major among three major disciplines, which are; (i) Integrated Industrial Design, (ii) Affective and Human Factors Engineering, and (iii) Engineering and Systems Design. The DHE's major system of the new design-engineering program was developed to foster the next generation designers and engineers, having talent in not only creative ideation but also systematic realization. In this paper, we first describe the founding background, educational rationale and curriculum structure. The curriculum includes students' selective curriculum paths based on their talent and aptitude; collaborative education structure as well as multidisciplinary team-based project courses taught by groups of instructors from different disciplines. Then, the new design-engineering education program is assessed in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The first step of the research is to assess the students' core competencies required in design-engineering combined program by using K-CESA (Korea Colligate Essential Skill Assessment) with 32 students enrolled in DHE. A phenomenological study is also conducted to understand the problems in the current program via in-depth interviews with representative students in DHE. Also, a creative trans-disciplinary short course for students from other universities with various majors (e. g., engineering and design) was offered and tested to evaluate the combined educational system. Finally, we propose the direction for curriculum improvement and follow-up assessment plans, including assessments for students and faculty.open0