Engineering Design Thinking, Teaching, and Learning

Clive L. Dym, Alice M. Agogino, Ozgur Eris, Daniel D. Frey, Larry J. Leifer
2005 Journal of Engineering Education  
This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored
more » ... al model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning. 1 The capstone course is a U.S. term for design courses typically taken in the senior year. The term cornestone is a recent U.S. coinage for design or project courses taken early (e.g., first year) in the engineering curriculum. It was intended to draw a distinction from and preserve the mataphor of the capstone course. G handle uncertainty; G make decisions; G think as part of a team in a social process; and G think and communicate in the several languages of design. A. Design Thinking as Divergent-Convergent Questioning Asking questions emerges as a beginning step of any design project or class in the problem definition phase [16] . No sooner has a client or professor defined a series of objectives for a designed artifact than the designers-whether in a real design studio or a classroom-want to know what the client really wants. What is a safe product? What do you mean by cheap? How do you define the best? Questioning is clearly an integral part of design. On the other hand, the majority of the educational content taught in today's engineering curricula is an epistemological approach, systematic questioning, where known, proven principles are applied to analyze a problem to reach verifiable, "truthful" answers or solutions. While it seems clear that systematic questioning describes analysis well, does it apply in a design context? One would expect an affirmative answer to this question, in part because design educators already argue that the tools and techniques used to assist designers' creativity are "...ways of asking questions, and presenting and viewing the answers to those questions as the design process unfolds" [16] . Further, since the accepted basic models of the design process (see, for example, Figure 2 .4 of [16] ) show iterative loops between various stages of design, it is clear that questioning of various kinds takes place at varying stages of the process. Aristotle proposed that "the kinds of questions we ask are as many as the kinds of things which we know" [22] . In other words, knowledge resides in the questions that can be asked and the answers that can be provided. Dillon identified a sequence of inquiry that highlights a hierarchy in Aristotle's approach: certain types of questions need to be asked and answered before others can be asked [23] . For instance, it would be unsound, misleading, and ineffective to question or reason about the cause of a phenomenon before verifying its existence and understanding its essence. Aristotle's ordering thus reveals a procedure, which constitutes the inquiry process in an epistemological context. Taxonomies of this procedure or inquiry process have been extended to computational models [24] , to the relationship between question asking and learning [25] , and to the types of questions students ask during tutoring sessions [26] . One of the major strengths of today's engineering curricula is their ability to implicitly convey to engineering students that Aristotelian procedure as a framework for approaching engineering Journal of Engineering Education January 2005 2 The acronym PBL is also used in the education literature-originally in medical education and more recently in discussions of college curricula such as business and law-to signify problem-based learning, in which abstract theoretical material is introduced in more "familiar," everyday problem situations [19] . The two PBL's have some common goals and implementation features, but they are nonetheless distinct pedagogical styles.
doi:10.1002/j.2168-9830.2005.tb00832.x fatcat:2mpdy7ooenaevk6alquu3hhpre