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

这个奖项的研究目的是表征专业工程设计师的设计认知（设计思维），并将他们的设计认知与学生工程师的设计认知进行比较。以前nsf资助的研究工程师设计的项目主要集中在研究学生的设计。对专业工程师设计的研究很少。工程设计科学不仅需要学生的实证结果，也需要专业人士的实证结果。获取工程师设计认知的实证研究方法是协议分析。本课题采用基于设计的本体编码方案，从专业工程师设计的协议研究中获取信息。该编码方案为描述设计师的设计认知提供了基础，并将设计师视频中的定性数据转化为定量数据，从而生成设计行为的统计模型。这些模型表征了设计师的设计认知。然后用它们来比较专业工程师和学生的设计认知，学生的设计认知在之前的一项nsf资助的研究中得到了表征。可交付的内容包括协议视频存档、一套协议文本、一套研究方法以及统计模型。如果成功，这项研究将描述专业工程师的设计行为。然后将其与设计的正式模型所预测的行为进行比较。本研究的结果旨在为确定专业工程师与本科工程师设计行为的异同提供依据。研究结果将被公布，以改善设计教育，使学生在本科和研究生设计教育期间更接近专业工程师。研究结果旨在为设计支持工具的生成奠定基础。

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.