MOD: Design Tools to Cognitive Processes to Innovation

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The U.S. is facing serious challenges in the fields of science and technology and our future engineers must use innovation to generate new products, create employment opportunities, and strengthen the national economy. Furthermore, the existing connections between cognitive science and engineering are nationally quite small. This study provides a much needed diverse set of investigators to bridge knowledge across these areas. Engineering design is a rich interplay of physical and mental. Successful design engineers move from ideas to completed designs using artifacts and tools. Over the past several decades, the number of tools and artifacts available to engineers has become nearly limitless. These tools include drawing programs, quantitative modeling software, sketch paper, computer aided design programs, and prototyping facilities. Despite their importance for supporting creativity and innovative ideas, little is presently known about how tools differentially support innovative design. A lack of knowledge how these tools impact innovative design limits improvements to tools and practical knowledge of how and when to use those tools in design.The goal of the current study is to begin to build a fundamental understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the role of tools and artifacts in the innovative design process, by combining strengths in cognitive science research and innovative design education (Swanson Center for Product Innovation) at the University of Pittsburgh. A large-scale experiment that examines the ways in which artifacts and tools contribute to innovative design is conducted. This experiment is used to collect a massive database of design activities, consisting of approximately 3,000 hours of video from approximately 60 undergraduate and graduate-level engineering design teams using cyber-infrastructure for video collection leveraged through this grant. The video is then strategically sampled to unpack the causal path from design/tools artifacts in the environment, to core cognitive processes underlying design, to dimensions of design creativity, to the ultimate success of the designed object. In addition, new engineering design innovativeness metrics are developed, validated, and refined. The merit of this study lies within the fact that such a comprehensive study on the learning of design tools and artifacts will substantially expand the understanding of the fundamental processes involved in this important, but often overlooked field.At the completion of this study, it is expected that the knowledge gained will allow the investigators to lead the development of a new suite of design tools and strategies for supporting practicing engineers and educating engineering students. These tools and strategies could have far reaching implications as they could initiate substantial changes in design practice and engineering design education. This study also involves an enormous data collection effort. The resulting video database will provide volumes of data on the role of tools and artifacts in innovative design, only a small portion of which is to be analyzed during the grant period. This video database will foster considerable follow-up analyses for years to come. The resulting video database will be disseminated throughout the academic community.