Directing Convergent and Divergent Activity through Design Feedback.

Design education across design disciplines prioritizes project-based courses to support student learning about design processes and strategies (Eastman, Newstetter, & McCracken, 1999; Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). Success in teaching these courses relies on the ability of instructors to mentor and guide students\u27 design paths, allowing students some freedom to determine design decisions on their own, while facilitating a structure where they can learn successful design strategies

Returning to Graduate School: Expectations of Success, Values of the Degree, and Managing the Costs

Background Limited research exists on the experiences of engineering returners – those with undergraduate degrees who work for at least five years and return to academia for graduate degrees. Returners bring a different perspective to their graduate studies and postgraduate work than direct‐pathway students but face additional challenges. Purpose Our aim was to understand practitioners' decisions to return to graduate school and complete graduate degrees. Guided by expectancy value theory, we investigated their beliefs about their ability to succeed; the interest, attainment, and utility values returners placed on graduate school; the costs they experienced in returning; and the personal, programmatic, and cultural factors that mitigated these costs. Design/Method We employed a qualitative interpretivist approach to investigate the returning experience through semi‐structured interviews with 10 returners. We analyzed the results deductively, using expectancy value theory to understand participants' expectations of success and the values of those experiences, and inductively, to understand the types of costs that influenced the decision to return and complete graduate school. Results Utility value drove participants' decisions to return and complete graduate programs, and participants had a high expectancy of success in earning their graduate degrees. Four types of costs emerged from analysis of the interviews: intellectual, balance, cultural and environmental, and financial. Participants employed various strategies to mitigate these costs. Conclusions With the results of our study, potential returners can more effectively plan for success in the graduate environment, and universities can develop initiatives to better recruit returners and support their success.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99102/1/jee20012.pd

What Does it Mean to Design? A Qualitative Investigation of Design Professionals' Experiences

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95041/1/j.2168-9830.2012.tb00048.x.pd

Teaching Creative Process across Disciplines

While there is great interest in higher education about teaching creative process, there have been relatively few studies of how courses can facilitate the development of creative skills. The goal of this study was to document how college instructors structure courses intended to develop students’ creative processes. The study data included interviews from instructors and students using a critical case sample of fifteen courses at a single U.S. University. A qualitative analysis of the transcripts yielded a set of 14 pedagogical elements appearing across courses. Common elements were open‐ended projects and skill‐building activities, and less frequently, risk taking experiences and self‐reflection. The sample included undergraduate courses in engineering, education, the liberal arts, and the arts, and the elements observed were often shared across courses from different disciplines. These findings provide a diverse set of pedagogical approaches and opportunities for building creative process skills within undergraduate courses.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148345/1/jocb158.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148345/2/jocb158_am.pd

Drivers of research topic selection for engineering doctoral students

In this study, we explored engineering doctoral students’ motivations for selecting their research topic. The extent to whichindividuals are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and the autonomy they have to make their own decisions hasimplications for their enjoyment of and success at a particular task. Given the importance of motivation, we sought toaddress a gap in the understanding of how doctoral students in engineering decide on a particular problem to study. Ourfindings are based on interviews with students with varying past educational and professional experiences that enable us tocapture a wide range of motivations for engineering PhD students’ research subject decisions. We found that the majorityof students interviewed reported some form of extrinsic motivation guiding their decision, though these students varied intheir autonomy to select their own topic. Of the students who reported intrinsic motivations for their research topicselection, many had extensive prior work experience that informed their topic choice. Funding played a major role inshaping students’ project decisions, which is reflective of the scale and expense of much of engineering work. However, ourfindings suggest there are a number of opportunities for students to identify research topics in which they personallyperceive as important and interesting

Evidence-based design heuristics for idea generation

How do product designers create multiple concepts to consider? To address this question, we combine evidence from four empirical studies of design process and outcomes, including award-winning products, multiple concepts for a project by an experienced industrial designer, and concept sets from 48 industrial and engineering designers for a single design problem. This compilation of over 3450 design process outcomes is analyzed to extract concept variations evident across design problems and solutions. The resulting set of patterns, in the form of 77 Design Heuristics, catalog how designers appear to introduce intentional variation into conceptual product designs. These heuristics provide ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that can help designers generate more, and more varied, candidate concepts to consider in the early phases of design

Students’ perceptions of the value of stakeholder engagement during engineering design

BackgroundHuman‐centered design approaches promote and facilitate comprehensive understanding of stakeholders to inform design decisions. Successful engagement with stakeholders is critical to favorable design outcomes and requires skillful information gathering and synthesizing processes, which present unique challenges to student designers.Purpose/HypothesisOur study sought to answer the following research question: What factors influence design teams’ perceptions of the value of stakeholder engagement during design decision‐making?Design/MethodDuring a capstone design experience, we conducted four semistructured group interviews with seven capstone undergraduate student design teams and collected their design reports. We analyzed the data across teams to identify factors that influenced teams’ perceptions of the value of stakeholder engagement.ResultsTeams perceived stakeholder specific interactions to be more useful when they prespecified a goal for the interaction, interacted with stakeholders who had specific subject matter expertise, or ceded control of the decision‐making process to stakeholders. Students perceived interactions to be less useful when information gathered varied across stakeholders or when information was not directly applicable to the design decision at hand.ConclusionsThe factors this study identified that influenced students’ perceptions of the usefulness of stakeholder interactions elucidate specific challenges students encounter when engaging with stakeholders. Students could benefit from pedagogical structures that assist them throughout design‐related engagement with stakeholders and when applying the information gathered through engagements with stakeholders to design decision‐making.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163394/2/jee20356.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163394/1/jee20356_am.pd