Search for: All records

The success of a design is not determined solely by its technical aspects. A design must work for the people who will be using it and in the context in which it will be used. Human-centered design approaches suggest strategies to remind engineering designers of the people impacted by their design decisions. While many of these strategies can be used within and across multiple design phases, during the act of sketching concepts during concept generation, there are few explicit strategies for centering people. We investigate possible impact from a simple intervention during a concept generation task through a between-subjects experiment. Working alone is a single design session, half of a group of mechanical engineering students were asked to explicitly “represent people” within their conceptual sketches. Afterwards, all students reviewed each of their concepts to answer, “Who is this idea for? Who do you imagine would use it?” Those who received the intervention requiring representation of people within concept sketches produced significantly longer reflections with greater depth compared to the control group. Adding drawings of people to sketches resulted in more consideration of the social and physical context of use and of the user's personal preferences and values. Depicting people in generated concepts substantially reduced claims a design is "for everyone,” suggesting explicit representation of potential users produced more thoughtful consideration of diversity among potential users. 

Divergent thinking is the process of exploring many options and perspectives and is a key part of effective and inclusive engineering outcomes. In engineering education, divergent exploration is often applied within idea generation; however, many other stages in engineering projects may benefit from divergent exploration, such as defining problems, identifying stakeholders, selecting problem solving approaches, and understanding potential implications of engineering decisions. Professional engineers often struggle to identify and manage diverse perspectives, and little is known about the practice of divergent exploration in engineering projects. To investigate, we interviewed a mechanical engineer about her exploration practices in a past professional project. From her striking examples of divergent thinking and barriers to its practice, we constructed a narrative-based educational tool for students, educators, and practitioners. The engineer’s firsthand experiences demonstrate that to think divergently, engineers must understand system constraints, explore widely, seek information from many sources, take risks, seek varied perspectives, and explore multiple methods to solve problems. 

Engineers have the power to drive innovation and rethink the way the world is designed. However, a key practice often absent from engineering education is facilitating innovation and considering diverse perspectives through divergent thinking. We define divergence in engineering practices as exploring multiple alternatives in any stage of engineering processes. Currently, engineering education and research focuses on divergence primarily in the generation and development of design solutions, supported by idea generation methods such as Brainstorming and Design Heuristics. But in practice, there are many other opportunities throughout an engineering project where engineers may find it useful to explore multiple alternatives. When does divergent thinking take place during engineering problem solving as it is currently practiced? We conducted 90-minute semi-structured interviews with mechanical engineering practitioners working in varied setting to elicit their experiences with divergent thinking taking place in their engineering projects. The initial results document divergent thinking in six different areas of engineering design processes: 1) problem understanding, 2) problem-solving methods and strategies, 3) research and information gathering, 4) stakeholder identification, 5) considering potential solutions, and 6) anticipating implications of decisions. These findings suggest engineers find divergent thinking useful in multiple areas of engineering practice, and we suggest goals for developing divergent thinking skills in engineering education. 

As problems become more complex, global, and interdisciplinary, engineers need to develop novel solutions and utilize resources, information, and tools in strategic and creative ways. Divergent thinking describes a process where multiple options, pathways, alternatives, or ideas are developed. For engineering students, divergent thinking can facilitate flexibility and expand opportunities considered when solving problems. To develop divergent thinking skills in engineering, we must understand how it is (and is not) facilitated in current engineering education experiences. Current pedagogy and resources available in engineering education on divergent thinking are limited. Thus, our research focused on exploring educational experiences in which students felt they considered divergent thinking. In this paper, we describe the iterative development of an interview protocol to elicit student experiences related to opportunities for divergent thinking. From the initial round of piloting, we found student awareness of divergent thinking was limited. Our findings highlight the need to structure questions in ways that align with students’ existing understandings of their engineering experiences. Our team made modifications to the protocol to address this, including using accessible terms to describe divergent thinking, asking students to describe one example project they remembered well, and. focusing questions within one step of the project selected by the student as most relevant to their exploration of alternatives. This iterative development of the protocol was successful in eliciting divergent thinking experiences across their work.