Exploring the role of Disciplinary Knowledge in Engineering when learning to Design

Three mechanical engineering teams are followed through their capstone design project as they navigate the ambiguous and contradictory requirements of a typical engineering design course. The pedagogy tends to be both weakly classified and weakly framed in terms introduced by Sociologist of Education, Basil Bernstein; leaving the decisions about what knowledge to draw on, in what sequence, and how, to the discretion of the students. The differential success of the three teams is analysed in terms of their use of disciplinary and practical knowledge to make decisions about their design and to produce a prototype. The semantics dimension of Legitimation Code Theory was used to analyse the data. The analysis suggests that meaning was completely encapsulated in the material product of design, at the expense of reflective or conceptual reasoning. While technical knowledge was evident in the process of design, it was the relation of this knowledge to the material artefact that mattered, but only secondarily to the functioning of the artefact. Consequently, simple artefacts were privileged over more complex artefacts, understandable in terms of simplifying the solution to a particular problem, but raising questions about dealing with more complex problems. When performance can be asserted with certainty without evidence of reflective or conceptual reasoning, it raises questions about technical solutions in the face of the uncertainty of the complex problems. If we want engineers to contribute to the grand challenges of our era, we need to think about how to reward both complexity and reflection, without losing simplicity and practicality