Designettes in Capstone: Characterizing the Impact of Early Design Experiences on Students' Capstone Education

Full engineering design experiences often require months to accomplish. In an effort to incorporate design, design thinking, and design innovation into curriculum without consuming extensive time, the use of shortened design experiences, referred to as “designettes,” has been undertaken. A designette can provide a partial or concentrated design experience by either removing certain parts of a full design process, or by focusing on certain steps, or both. A designette allows students various experiences with the design process that can provide a “learning scaffold” for their implementation of the full suite of design methods over the course of a longer project. Designettes likewise provide a mechanism and construct for learning multidisciplinary technical content and skill sets. In the current educational research, the project focus of a designette was selected from one of two options: either a small, related portion of a larger project, or a totally unrelated project with respect to a larger project. The advantage of a designette being a small part of a larger project is that the time spent on the designette is directly related to the project goals of that larger project. The advantage of having an unrelated designette is that the students feel freedom to take risks and focus on creativity and innovation because they do not experience the stress related to satisfying the sponsor that comes with the larger project. Faculty and student feedback was primarily used to characterize and compare the designette’s effectiveness. The current research shows that there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to having the designette project either related, or unrelated to a longer term, sponsored project, such as in a capstone experience. Those who implement designettes can use the detailed data provided in this research to determine which approach best matches their capstone program’s distinctive attributes and goals.