Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Market-driven design concept formation in undergraduate engineers

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Designing successful products requires a balance of many competencies, including technical expertise and business acumen. While undergraduate engineering programs emphasize technical design and analysis, they generally do not adequately teach or discuss marketability, and evidence suggests that engineering students are graduating without a sufficient grasp of the bigger picture of design. At the same time, research in engineering design has resulted in new market-driven design techniques, which provide guidance for design practitioners regarding how to develop products that are both technically sound and marketable. This research project studies the application of market-driven design methods to engineering education, by examining how undergraduate engineering students learn design. It specifically seeks to understand how students' mental models of design develop throughout a third-year design curriculum, which introduces market-driven design concepts through course material and novel interactive tools. By learning more about students' initial mental models of design, as well as how this course influences their conceptions, this project will provide a foundational understanding and recommendations regarding holistic design education for engineers.To bridge the gap between market-driven design and engineering education research, this proposal explores how students currently understand design as a process before and after exposing them to market-driven design approaches and tools in the context of an engineering design course. The fundamental research questions are: (1) To what extent do undergraduate engineering students' initial conceptions of design account for the market context, such as competition and consumer considerations? (2) In what ways do these design conceptions change after introducing market-driven design techniques and tools in a design course? Data from concept maps (pre- and post-instruction), student reflections on their conceptions of design, and a survey of student perceptions of the course and their understanding of design will be collected and analyzed. This will contribute to a stronger understanding of how students conceptually balance the technical and non-technical elements of design, as well as evidence regarding the value of a constructivism-based educational approach to advancing student understanding of market-driven design. In addition, these research questions will help design researchers to understand the needs of market-driven design methods, as it provides a baseline for how engineers are currently approaching design and how receptive they are to the processes and tools from the research community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.