Using Design Process Timelines to Teach Design: Implementing Research Results

While design has been increasingly taught in engineering courses over the last decade, there are still many opportunities to improve the effectiveness of design learning. One opportunity is to leverage research on design processes in classrooms as design is taught. This paper presents student work from two instances of a small seminar course in which empirically-based design process timelines were used as the basis of teaching undergraduate engineering students about design processes. Design process timelines are graphical representations that display how an individual allocates time across a set of design activities as they engage in a design process. These representations, constructed with data from individuals with varying levels of design expertise, present salient information about how individual design processes can differ. We have developed a series of tasks based on these representations whose purpose is to teach students about design processes, and we implemented them with eight undergraduate engineering students in two separate research seminars at a large state institution. Specifically, in these tasks, students were presented with design timelines as well as the empirically-based codes that were used to construct the timelines, and were asked to develop new representations from that data (an activity called Design Brief 1, or DB1). They were then asked to execute a design task, capture their own design process, and then create a representation of their personal design process (an activity called Design Brief 2, or DB2). Finally, at the end of a quarter that included the above tasks plus tasks to consider additional design issues such as context and perspective, students were asked to create a “memory aid” to capture important aspects of the design process that they wish to take with them to their future design experiences. In this paper, we present the work that the students turned in for the design projects. We also present a mapping of the students’ work to the elements of the design process presented to them in the design timelines to provide insights on the impact of the use of the timelines to teach design.