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ABSTRACT: The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) is one of the most effective and commonly used design evaluation methods. However, it fails to capture implicit cognitive processes and has mainly been studied in a homogenous design modality. To bridge this gap, the present study investigates the impact of design ideas represented in different modalities (i.e., text-only, sketch-only, text + sketch) on design evaluations for creativity, novelty, and usefulness, and examine human gaze patterns during the evaluation process. Our findings showed that novice raters exhibit higher interrater reliability and greater convergence in visual attention when rating ideas containing sketches compared to text-only design modality, highlighting the value of visual elements in design evaluations. 

Abstract Applications for additive manufacturing (AM) continue to increase as more industries adopt the technology within their product development processes. There is a growing demand for designers to acquire and hone their design for AM (DfAM) intuition and generate innovative solutions with AM. Resources that promote DfAM intuition, however, historically default to physical or digitally non-immersive modalities. Immersive virtual reality (VR) naturally supports 3D spatial perception and reasoning, suggesting its intuitive role in evaluating geometrically complex designs and fostering DfAM intuition. However, the effects of immersion on DfAM evaluations are not well-established in the literature. This study contributes to this gap in the literature by examining DfAM evaluations for a variety of designs across modalities using varying degrees of immersion. Specifically, it observes the effects on the outcomes of the DfAM evaluation, the effort required of evaluators, and their engagement with the designs. Findings indicate that the outcomes from DfAM evaluations in immersive and non-immersive modalities are similar without statistically observable differences in the cognitive load experienced during the evaluations. Active engagement with the designs, however, is observed to be significantly different between immersive and non-immersive modalities. By contrast, passive engagement remains similar across the modalities. These findings have interesting implications on how organizations train designers in DfAM, as well as on the role of immersive modalities in design processes. Organizations can provide DfAM resources across different levels of immersion, enabling designers to customize how they acquire DfAM intuition and solve complex engineering problems. 

Abstract Solving problems with additive manufacturing (AM) often means fabricating geometrically complex designs, layer-by-layer, along one or multiple directions. Designers navigate this 3D spatial complexity to determine the best design and manufacturing solutions to produce functional parts, manufacturable by AM. However, to assess the manufacturability of their solutions, designers need modalities that naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Creating physical parts offers such visualization but becomes expensive and time-consuming over multiple design iterations. While non-immersive simulations can alleviate this cost of physical visualization, adding digital immersion further improves outcomes from the visualization experience. This research, therefore, studies how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect: 1. determining the best solution for additively manufacturing a design and 2. the cognitive load experienced from completing the DfAM problem-solving experience. For the study, designers created a 3D manifold model and simulated manufacturing it in either CAx or VR. Analysis of the filtered data from the study shows that slicing and printing their designs in VR yields a significant change in the manufacturability outcomes of their design compared to CAx. No observable differences were found in the cognitive load experienced between the two modalities. This means that the experiences in VR may influence improvements to manufacturability outcomes without changes to the mental exertion experienced by the designers. This presents key implications for how designers are equipped to solve design problems with AM. 

Parents boost STEM skills by scaffolding children’s attention and discovery during play, but many need support to do so. Using Human Centered Design (HCD) methods, we created activity kits fostering parents’ (a) involvement in and (b) valuing of parent-child play to promote preschoolers’ STEM skills. Study 1 documents how HCD methods informed the design of guided activity kits. In initial home visits, we videorecorded 6 parent-child dyads playing with basic building materials. Play revealed minimal parental STEM scaffolding and talk. Collaborating with 18 families and drawing on prior research, parent interviews, videotaped play sessions, and advisory-board members’ expertise, the interdisciplinary research team designed and refined activity kit prototypes. Study 2 was a randomized field test comparing use and evaluation of final guided kits (n=50) versus basic kits (n=25) which contained identical building materials and challenges but omitted scaffolding guides. Both groups received a kit by mail every other week for 10 weeks. Relative to parents given basic kits, parents given guided kits (a) reported significantly more sustained use of the kits across the 10 weeks, (b) felt more self-efficacy in fostering their child’s STEM learning, and (c) judged that their child had achieved greater STEM-skill learning from program use. 

Traditional lectures have difficulties instilling pragmatic skills in construction engineering students due to the inability to illuminate the complexities within the human-robot collaborative construction environment. While on-site can acclimatize construction students to reality and construct knowledge that can solve safety challenges, it is challenging to organize on-site training trips owing to the dangerous nature of construction workplaces. This research aimed to explore virtual reality (VR) as a tool to enhance students’ perception and knowledge of construction robotic safety. For this purpose, the study developed a virtual training platform for providing construction engineering students with safety knowledge on interacting with simulated robots within the virtual environment of construction sites. A self-assessment approach was leveraged among 20 recruited students to demonstrate the efficacy of students’ engagement and learning outcomes from the proposed learning approach over the traditional learning approach. Results indicated a statistical difference in students’ learning outcomes and engagement levels between the developed approach and the traditional approach. Findings demonstrated the implications of VR as an experiential tool to enhance the students’ learning of robotic safety in construction. 

Abstract While psychological safety is a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in team performance across fields that can positively impact the creative process, there have been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge, we do not know whether fostering psychological safety in a team environment is important for specific engineering design outputs from concept generation and screening practices. This study provides one of the first attempts at addressing this research gap through an empirical study with 69 engineering design student teams over the course of 4- and 8-week design projects. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of psychological safety on the number and quality (judged by goodness) of ideas generated. In addition, we explored the role of psychological safety on ownership bias and goodness in the concept screening process. The results of the study identified that while psychological safety was negatively related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. This result indicates that while psychological safety may not increase team productivity in terms of the number of ideas produced, it may impact team effectiveness in coming up with viable candidate ideas to move forward in the design process. In addition, there was no relationship between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening. These findings provide quantitative evidence on the role of psychological safety on engineering team idea production and identify areas for further study. 

Abstract The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation.