Identification, Characterization & Measurement of Design Skills and Designer Profiles

该奖项的研究目标是对在工程设计早期阶段至关重要的设计技能有一个正式的理解。这个项目的主要组成部分是：(1)列举设计技能及其与具体概念设计任务的联系；(2)根据理论和经验上可验证的可测量指标来描述这些技能；(3)研究每项技能的不同指标的子因素之间的关系；(4)调查技能测量工具；(5)使用标准和结构有效性检查来评估和改进测量工具；(6)根据技能集合来描述设计师概况和团队概况。这项研究将把设计研究与人类解决和学习问题、视觉和空间推理、模式识别和科学发现的认知理论联系起来。它试图深入了解设计知识是如何使用的，以及优秀设计师与技能较差的设计师之间的区别。如果成功，本研究成果将促进设计教育和基于协作团队的设计。设计练习和课程可以针对特定技能或这些技能的子集，这些练习或课程的有效性可以通过跟踪设计师简介的变化以客观的方式进行评估。基于技能的评分将从根本上背离当前的评分实践，明确确定个人的优势和劣势。为了在工业中组建协作设计团队，可以匹配互补的设计师配置文件，以确保团队作为一个整体拥有其要承担的项目的所有基本技能。由于人类设计师是产品开发中最重要的元素，因此对优秀设计师所拥有的技能有一个基本的了解是很重要的。

The research objective of this award is to gain a formal understanding of design skills that are critical in early phases of engineering design. The major components of this project are: (1) Enumeration of design skills and their association with specific conceptual design tasks; (2) Characterization of these skills in terms of measurable indicators that are theoretically and empirically verifiable; (3) Study of relationships between sub-factors of different indicators of each skill; (4) Investigation of skill measurement instruments; (5) Evaluation and refinement of measurement instruments using criterion and construct validity checks; (6) Characterization of designer profiles and team profiles in terms of skill sets. This research will connect design research to established cognitive theories of human problem solving and learning, visual and spatial reasoning, pattern recognition and scientific discovery. It seeks to gain insights into how design knowledge is used and what differentiates good designers from ones less skilled. If successful, the results of this research will improve design education and collaborative team based design. Design exercises and courses could target specific skills or sub-sets of those skills, and the effectiveness of these exercises or courses could be evaluated in an objective manner by tracking changes in designer profiles. Skill based grading would be a radical departure from current grading practices, identifying strengths and weaknesses of individuals explicitly. For forming collaborative design teams in industry, complementary designer profiles could be matched to ensure that the team as a whole has all of the skills deemed essential for the of project that it is to undertake. Since the human designer is the most important element in product development, it is important to gain a fundamental understanding of skill sets possessed by good designers.