Analyzing the display of professional knowledge through interpersonal interactions in design reviews

Design review in an educational setting is an activity that helps educators in assessing students’ progress, and provides opportunities for students to learn how professionals in the field perceive and judge design-in-process, aka professional vision. In this study we analyzed design reviews to understand how interpersonal interactions between participants provides a context for the expression of professional knowledge. We identified episodes of professional vision interaction, and examined the interpersonal responses that constitute a design review meeting. The results of the analysis demonstrated how the context for the display of professional vision was co-created through interactions between the reviewer and the students

A reflective approach to learning in a global design project

This paper describes a three-week project run jointly between the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, MA and Stanford University, CA. The purpose of this class was to provide students with an understanding of the technological and organisational issues involved in global product development teams, and to provide an experience which would prepare them for work in such environments. Reflective learning techniques were applied, including reviews of relevant literature, analyses of case studies, and a critical review of the completed project. The main result of this approach was that students had a more considered attitude towards the project process than in typical, more output-focussed student design assignments. This was crucial given the cultural and pedagogical variations across institutions. The Global Team Design Project was successful, particularly for the first year of implementation, and provides a potential framework that other institutions could employ in similar project classe

A framework for design engineering education in a global context

This paper presents a framework for teaching design engineering in a global context using innovative technologies to enable distributed teams to work together effectively across international and cultural boundaries. The DIDET Framework represents the findings of a 5-year project conducted by the University of Strathclyde, Stanford University and Olin College which enhanced student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, directly experiencing different cultural contexts and accessing a variety of digital information sources via a range of innovative technology. The use of innovative technology enabled the formalization of design knowledge within international student teams as did the methods that were developed for students to store, share and reuse information. Coaching methods were used by teaching staff to support distributed teams and evaluation work on relevant classes was carried out regularly to allow ongoing improvement of learning and teaching and show improvements in student learning. Major findings of the 5 year project include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful eLearning implementations. The DIDET Framework encapsulates all the conclusions relating to design engineering in a global context. Each of the principles for effective distributed design learning is shown along with relevant findings and suggested metrics. The findings detailed in the paper were reached through a series of interventions in design engineering education at the collaborating institutions. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the pedagogical and the technological approaches

Using Dedal to share and reuse distributed engineering design information

The overall goal of the project is to facilitate the reuse of previous design experience for the maintenance, repair and redesign of artifacts in the electromechanical engineering domain. An engineering team creates information in the form of meeting summaries, project memos, progress reports, engineering notes, spreadsheet calculations and CAD drawings. Design information captured in these media is difficult to reuse because the way design concepts are referred to evolve over the life of a project and because decisions, requirements and structure are interrelated but rarely explicitly linked. Based on protocol analysis of the information seeking behavior of designer's, we defined a language to describe the content and the form of design records and implemented this language in Dedal, a tool for indexing, modeling and retrieving design information. We first describe the approach to indexing and retrieval in Dedal. Next we describe ongoing work in extending Dedal's capabilities to a distributed environment by integrating it with World Wide Web. This will enable members of a design team who are not co-located to share and reuse information

Distributed design teams : embedded one-on-one conversations in one-to-many

Engineering design is fundamentally social, requiring a lot of interaction and communication between the people involved. Additionally, good design often relies upon the ability of a cross-functional team to create a shared understanding of the task, the process and the respective roles of its members. The negotiation and bargaining for common ground are essential in the design process. It is important to provide tools and methods so that also geographically distributed design teams are given the opportunity to engage in such social interactions. This paper presents a study of interpersonal communication within the Distributed Team Innovation (DTI) framework; a joint product design project between Luleå University of Technology and Stanford University that investigates the future of collaborative product development. The common object of work is to design "Virtual Pedals" for Volvo Car Corporation.In the study, we noticed that one-on-one conversations, held in parallel to a main discussion, were common in co-located teamwork and that they are a natural part of creative teamwork. These conversations were mainly used to clarify things and to discuss vague ideas or personal disagreements. Additionally, they were often used instead of, or as a precursor to, bringing up a topic with the whole group. In distributed meetings side conversations were discouraged and current systems for distributed collaboration could not provide sufficient support for these subtle interactions. This has important implications for supporting and improving the performance of global teams, and it suggests that the one-to-many channel of today's video conferencing technology is severely limiting.Godkänd; 2002; 20070328 (petert

Dedal: using Domain Concepts to Index Engineering Design Information

The goal of Dedal is to facilitate the reuse of engineering design experience by providing an intelligent guide for browsing multimedia design documents. Based on protocol analysis of design activities, w e defined a language to describe the content and the form of technical documents for mechanical design. W e use this language to index pages of an Electronic Design Notebook which contains text and graphics material, meeting reports and transcripts of conversations among designers. Index and query representations combine elements of the design language with concepts from a model of the designed artifact. The information retrieval mechanism uses heuristic knowledge from the artifact model to help engineers formulate questions, guide the search for relevant information and refine the existing set of indices. Dedal is a compromise between domain-independent argumentation-based systems and pure model-based systems which assume a complete formalization of all design documents