The Effects of Open Innovation on Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing in Student Design Teams

Author(s):  
Michael D. Koch ◽  
Richard J. Schulte ◽  
Irem Y. Tumer

As the need to innovate more creatively and effectively becomes increasingly apparent in engineering design, powerful open design tools and practices have emerged that are allowing organizations and firms to tap an already vast pool of skills, knowledge and intellect to solve complex design problems. The need for engineering design educators to bring these new trends into the classroom continues to grow as the industry for which students are being prepared begins to revamp its design strategies and practices in the pursuit of more openly accessible information infrastructures. By conducting an experimental study of over 25 student design groups in an undergraduate design engineering class, our team was able to gauge the relevance and utility of collaboration and knowledge sharing between and within design groups. Specifically, issues and opportunities were identified to help bring engineering and design education in line with the increasingly networked and distributed professional engineering environment that students will be enter upon graduation.

Author(s):  
Yong Zeng ◽  
Shengji Yao ◽  
Michel Couturier ◽  
Frank Collins

Recently a new design methodology, Environment-Based Design (EBD) [1, 2] has been developed. In using the model of EBD, three elements are important: primitive synthesis knowledge, primitive environment and primitive solutions. Based on the three elements, three design strategies have been validated in [3] for generating new design solutions: formulating design problems differently, changing the sequence of decomposition of the design problem and extending synthesis knowledge. Increasing the possibilities of generating new design solutions may increase the chance of getting creative design solutions. Thus the three strategies for leading to new design solutions can be introduced into our engineering design education for helping and inspiring students generate creative design solutions. In this paper, we will first briefly introduce EBD model and the three design strategies leading to new design solutions, then explain how EBD can be integrated into the design education of engineering students and elaborate how the design strategies can be used to help students generate different design solutions.


Author(s):  
Aleksander Czekanski ◽  
Maher Al-Dojayli ◽  
Tom Lee

Engineering practice and design in particular have gone through several changes during the last two decades whether due to scientific achievements including the evolution in novel engineering materials, computational advancements, globalization and economic constraints as well as the strategic needs which are the drive for innovative engineering. All these factors have impacted and shaped to certain extent the educational system in North America and Canada in particular. Currently, high percentage of the engineering graduates would require extensive training in industry to be able to conduct reliable complex engineering designs supported by scientific verification and validation, understand the complete design stages and phases, and identify the economic and cultural impact on such designs. This task, however, faces great challenges without educational support in such vastly changing economy.Lots of attention has been devoted to engineering design education in the recent years to incorporate engineering design courses supported by team design projects and capstone projects. Nevertheless, the lack of integrated education system towards engineering design programs can undermine the benefits of such efforts. In this paper, observations and analysis of the challenges in engineering design are presented from both academic and industrial points of view. Furthermore, a proposed vertical and lateral engineering education program is discussed. This program is structured to cover every year of the engineering education curricula, which emphasizes on innovative thinking, design strategies, support from and integration with other technical engineering courses, the use of advanced analysis tools, team collaboration, management and leadership, multidisciplinary education and industrial involvement. Its courses have just commenced for freshmen engineering students at the newly launched Mechanical Engineering Department at the Lassonde School of Engineering, York University.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Mountain

It has been stated that the topic of design is not conducive to assessment by concept inventory. While design problems are more ambiguous than problems in analytical subjects, such as physics, statics, or thermodynamics; the broader design education community of scholars might agree on a set of concepts that are essential to the fundamental understanding of design. Following a review of textbooks, industry interviews, and other literary sources, this paper will propose a set of commonly accepted overarching concepts that might form a nucleus of an engineering design concept inventory. This is intended primarily to initiate a dialog among the design engineering education community about the future development of a design concept inventory and it’s applicability in assessing the design content knowledge of undergraduate engineering students prior to entering the profession as graduate engineers.


Author(s):  
Dazhong Wu ◽  
Merlin Morlock ◽  
Prateek Pande ◽  
David W. Rosen ◽  
Dirk Schaefer

Over the past few years, Social Product Development (SPD) has emerged as a new trend to improve traditional engineering design and product realization processes. SPD involves the concepts of crowdsourcing, mass collaboration, customer co-creation, and most recently cloud-based design and manufacturing. One of the key characteristics of SPD is to apply social computing techniques (e.g., social networking sites and online communities) to support different phases of product realization processes. In line with this trend, our objective is to help our students become familiar with this paradigm shift and learn how to solve engineering design problems in a distributed and collaborative setting. Consequently, we have experimented with introducing some aspects of SPD into one of our graduate level engineering design courses. In this paper, we (1) introduce a SPD process that is implemented in the course, (2) present a case study from one of the design teams, and (3) share our experience and lessons with respect to the implementation of the SPD process.


Author(s):  
Garrett Foster ◽  
Micah Holland ◽  
Scott Ferguson ◽  
William Deluca

Industry demands that graduating engineers possess the ability to solve complex problems requiring multidisciplinary approaches and systems-level thinking. Unfortunately, current curricula often focus on analytical approaches to problem solving. Further, adding courses focused solely on engineering design is often unachievable due to the large amount of material covered in today’s undergraduate engineering curricula. Combined, these prevent a comprehensive focus on engineering design education from being realized. To overcome these time and resource constraints, this paper proposes the use of computational modules within current courses. The investigators hypothesize that the modules would eliminate the repetitive analysis barrier in design problems, thus allowing for design-related experiences to be included earlier in the curricula as opposed to postponing it to a capstone experience. Four major hurdles that hinder successful integration of modules in current engineering courses are: a) engaging students such that they will want to use the modules; b) ensuring the modules are easy to use; c) reducing the complexity of deploying the modules into the classroom; and d) providing educational value. To address these issues, this paper treats the design of the modules as a product design problem. This paper presents the redesign process followed to improve two different design modules planned for implementation in the engineering curriculum at North Carolina State University. Additionally, this research indicates that using a formal redesign process enhances a module’s ability to overcome the hurdles listed above.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3041-3050
Author(s):  
Georgios Koronis ◽  
Hernan Casakin ◽  
Arlindo Silva ◽  
Jacob Kai Siang Kang

AbstractThis study centers on using different types of brief information to support creative outcomes in architectural and engineering design and its relation to design expertise. We explore the influence of design briefs characterized by abstract representations and/or instructions to frame design problems on the creativity of concept sketches produced by novice and advanced students. Abstract representations of problem requirements served as stimuli to encourage associative thinking and knowledge transfer. The Ishikawa/Fishbone Diagram was used to foster design restructuring and to modify viewpoints about the main design drives and goals. The design outcomes generated by novice and advanced engineering/architecture students were assessed for their creativity using a pairwise experimental design. Results indicated that advanced students generated more novel design solutions while also contributing the most useful solutions overall. Implications for creativity in design education and professional practice are presented. Educational programs aimed at promoting creativity in the design studio may find it helpful to consider that the way design briefs are constructed can either promote or inhibit different aspects of design creativity.


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