Design and Diagnostic Problem-solving Approaches – Application to Thermal Comfort and Indoor Air Quality

The engineers are usually confronted to two types of problems: design or troubleshooting. The design concerns the creation of a new product (in our case the product is a building, building component, mechanical or electrical system) and the troubleshooting involves fixing an existing product using a sequential diagnostic. In this paper, we introduce how these two notions have been introduced to undergraduate students through an undergraduate design course. Two case studies from building engineering are presented: thermal comfort and indoor air quality (sick building syndrome) taken from undergraduate design courses. A flow chart is presented and discussed for both cases. We discuss the design program from students’ point of view, and the experience earned in design, experimentation, and also in written and oral communication skills. Future plans to evaluate the effectiveness of the case studies in terms of learning outcomes, as well as plans to evaluate it in undergraduate architectural engineering training are also presented.