The Design Cognition of Professional Engineers and How They Differ from Students

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The research objective of this award is to characterize the design cognition (design thinking) of professional engineering designers and to compare their design cognition with that of student engineers designing. Previous NSF-funded projects that involved studying engineers designing have primarily focused on studying students designing. There is a paucity of research on studying professional engineers designing. The science of engineering design requires empirical results not just from students but also from professionals. The empirical research method used to gain access to engineers design cognition is protocol analysis. This project uses a design-based ontological coding scheme to derive information from protocol studies of professional engineers designing. This coding scheme provides the foundation for describing the design cognition of designers and converts the qualitative data in a video of a designer into quantitative data from which statistical models of design behavior can be generated. These models characterize the design cognition of the designers. They are then used to compare the design cognition of professional engineers with that of students, whose design cognition was characterized in a previous NSF-funded study. Deliverable include an archive of protocol videos, a set of protocol transcripts, and a set of research methodologies as well as the statistical models.If successful, this research will characterize the design behavior of professional engineers. This will then be compared with the behavior predicted by formal models of designing. The results of this research are intended to provide the basis for determining similarities and differences between the design behavior of professional engineers and undergraduate engineers. The results will be disseminated to allow for improvement in design education to bring students to closer to professional engineers during their undergraduate and graduate design education. The results are intended to lay the foundation for the generation of design support tools.