Understanding Informed Design through Trade-Off Decisions With an Empirically-Based Protocol for Students and Design Educators

Trade-off decisions, which necessitate striking a balance between two or more desirable but competing features, are a crucial part of design practice. However, they are known to be difficult for student designers to make. While designers, educators, and researchers have numerous methods to assess the quality of design artifacts, these methods are not necessarily easy to use, nor do they indicate design competency. Moreover, they are not grounded in a definition of engineering design. The objectives of this study were twofold. First, we developed a protocol to depict design artifact quality through the lens of design trade-off decisions. We aimed to produce a protocol that:(1) encompasses multiple complementary and competing dimensions, (2) can be applied consistently and systematically, and (3) indicates design competency. We conceptualized a quantitative representation of the degree to which a design artifact addresses human, technical, and economic requirements called the Trade-off Value Protocol. Second, we tested the Trade-off Value Protocol by applying it to 398 middle school students’ design artifacts of energy-efficient homes. We used an etic approach of thematic analysis to identify the patterns of variation therein. We found five distinct patterns of variation in the set of student design artifacts, which suggested certain trends in the way that students address design dimensions and demonstrate varying levels of design competency. The Trade-off Value Protocol isolates an important feature of design competency with which beginning designers often struggle and could be a tool for educators to help students become more informed designers

Entrepreneurship Assessment in Higher Education: A Research Review for Engineering Education Researchers

BackgroundDespite the wide adoption of entrepreneurship by United States engineering programs, there have been few advances in how to measure the influences of entrepreneurial education on engineering students. We believe the inadequate growth in engineering entrepreneurship assessment research is due to the limited use of research emerging from the broader entrepreneurship education assessment community.PurposeThis paper explores entrepreneurship education assessment by documenting the current state of the research and identifying the theories, variables, and research designs most commonly used by the broader community. We then examine if and how these theories and constructs are used in engineering entrepreneurship education.Scope/MethodTwo literature databases, Scopus® and Proquest, were searched systematically for entrepreneurship education assessment research literature. This search yielded 2,841 unique papers. Once inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, 359 empirical research papers were coded for study design, theory, variables measured, instruments, and validity and reliability.ConclusionsWhile there has been growth in entrepreneurship education assessment research, little exchange of ideas across the disciplines of business, engineering, and education is occurring. Nonempirical descriptions of programs outweigh empirical research, and these empirical studies focus on affective, rather than cognitive or behavioral, outcomes. This pattern within the larger entrepreneurship community is mirrored in engineering where the use of theoryâ based, validated entrepreneurship education assessment instruments generally focuses on the context of intent to start a new company. Given the engineering community’s goals to support engineering entrepreneurship beyond business creation, the engineering education community should consider developing assessment instruments based in theory and focused on engineeringâ specific entrepreneurship outcomes.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145556/1/jee20197.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145556/2/jee20197_am.pd

Giving and Responding to Feedback through Visualisations in Design Critiques

Designers develop skills and knowledge through experience and feedback – feedback from colleagues, clients, supervisors, users, stakeholders, or the success or failure of a solution and design instructors. However, the design coaches (instructors and industry clients) and design students must negotiate ambiguity in the feedback process. In this article, we investigate visualisation within a design critique setting, where the industrial design instructor and the students are navigating ambiguity while the instructor is providing feedback on the design work. Using a constitutive research approach, we investigate the relationships among visualisation, ambiguity and critique, where each of these components offers a lens into understanding how designers use the tensions within ambiguity and clarity to achieve designs that fulfil assignments or other purposes. As part of this process, we characterise differences between the ways the instructor and the student interact with the human and non-human agents. The negotiations of ambiguity among human and non-human agents through and within the constitutive processes of visualisation offers fresh insights into how design is accomplished as well as how visualisation can be expanded productively in design education contexts