Consolidating engineering design and design thinking frameworks for teaching design to engineering students at liberal arts universities

Abdullah Umair Bajwa; Abdul Basit Memon

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Conference: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Baltimore , Maryland
Publication Date: June 25, 2023
Start Date: June 25, 2023
End Date: June 28, 2023
Conference Session: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 6
Tagged Division: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED)
Page Count: 17
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--42753
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/42753
Download Count: 261

Paper Authors

biography

Abdullah Umair Bajwa Habib University

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Abdullah is a mechanical engineer from Lahore, Pakistan. After graduating, he worked as a turbomachinery engineer before embarking to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Texas A&M University. There he studied gas exchange in stationary, natural gas two-stroke engines to reduce their emissions. Towards the end of his PhD, he started teaching remotely at Habib University – a newly formed private liberal arts university in Pakistan - and joined full-time as an assistant professor after his graduation and taught courses in engineering design, manufacturing, and thermodynamics; and oversaw the design and manufacturing workshop. After teaching for almost two years, Abdullah moved to the University of Oxford where, in addition to researching ways to adapt the internal combustion engine for a carbon-free mobility future, he tutors courses in fluid mechanics and thermodynamics in the Department of Engineering Science and is a Research Associate at Balliol College.

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biography

Abdul Basit Memon Habib University orcid.org/0000-0003-3522-2052

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Dr. Abdul Basit Memon is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Habib University, a liberal arts college in Pakistan. Dr. Memon received his graduate training in Mathematical Systems Theory at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is one of the founding engineering faculty at Habib University, and has been instrumental in the development of the engineering curriculum there. He has been interested in seamless integration of design education in the engineering curriculum, and has taught various courses in engineering design, design thinking, workshop practice, and capstone design. Besides design education, his interests lie in control theory and robotics. He has also served as Director for the Electrical and Computer Engineering program, and Assistant Dean for the School of Science and Engineering at Habib University.

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Abstract

In the post-industrial revolution era, after a prolonged period of ever-increasing emphasis on specialism in undergraduate engineering education, in recent decades there has been a shift towards promoting generalism and the development of trans-disciplinary problem-solving skills. Such reprioritizations of learning outcomes have been the most explicit and deliberate at liberal arts universities. A consequence of this reimagining has been the co-opting of the design process-based problem-solving framework, traditionally considered to be an engineering or architecture instrument, by other disciplines like management, arts, humanities and social sciences. The advent of frameworks like ‘human-centered design,’ or ‘design thinking’ has formalized the discipline-agnostic teaching and application of design, and has led to the creation of multiple sets of vocabularies and implementation schemes despite all having recursive iterative and adaptive features at their core, emphasizing similar values, and calling upon overlapping cognitive competencies.

This paper compares the engineering design process to popular design thinking methods in an effort to consolidate the two by highlighting similarities and differences between them. The comparison is based on a review of the literature and pedagogical experiences of faculty teaching both processes to engineering students at a liberal arts university. The traditional domains of application of the two approaches and modalities of various stages of the processes are analyzed to understand the spirit of each framework and then comment on their implementation attributes like the relative emphasis on quality vs efficiency, level of iteration, mindset cultivation, and innovation. Variations in these implementation attributes, and not underlying cognitive structures, are hypothesized to be the source of differences in the two frameworks. A mapping across the two is presented, and some recommendations about their teaching are shared. It is hoped that design educators can use learnings from the comparative study in course design and teaching to enable engineering students to: (i) understand general principles of design-based problem-solving and develop a designer’s mindset, (ii) link problem-solving techniques taught in engineering and non-engineering courses/contexts, and (iii) develop necessary skill and vocabulary sets to interact with non-engineers trained in various forms of the design framework

Citation
Format

Bajwa, A. U., & Memon, A. B. (2023, June), Consolidating engineering design and design thinking frameworks for teaching design to engineering students at liberal arts universities Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--42753

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - In the post-industrial revolution era, after a prolonged period of ever-increasing emphasis on specialism in undergraduate engineering education, in recent decades there has been a shift towards promoting generalism and the development of trans-disciplinary problem-solving skills. Such reprioritizations of learning outcomes have been the most explicit and deliberate at liberal arts universities. A consequence of this reimagining has been the co-opting of the design process-based problem-solving framework, traditionally considered to be an engineering or architecture instrument, by other disciplines like management, arts, humanities and social sciences. The advent of frameworks like ‘human-centered design,’ or ‘design thinking’ has formalized the discipline-agnostic teaching and application of design, and has led to the creation of multiple sets of vocabularies and implementation schemes despite all having recursive iterative and adaptive features at their core, emphasizing similar values, and calling upon overlapping cognitive competencies. 

This paper compares the engineering design process to popular design thinking methods in an effort to consolidate the two by highlighting similarities and differences between them. The comparison is based on a review of the literature and pedagogical experiences of faculty teaching both processes to engineering students at a liberal arts university. The traditional domains of application of the two approaches and modalities of various stages of the processes are analyzed to understand the spirit of each framework and then comment on their implementation attributes like the relative emphasis on quality vs efficiency, level of iteration, mindset cultivation, and innovation. Variations in these implementation attributes, and not underlying cognitive structures, are hypothesized to be the source of differences in the two frameworks. A mapping across the two is presented, and some recommendations about their teaching are shared. It is hoped that design educators can use learnings from the comparative study in course design and teaching to enable engineering students to: (i) understand general principles of design-based problem-solving and develop a designer’s mindset, (ii) link problem-solving techniques taught in engineering and non-engineering courses/contexts, and (iii) develop necessary skill and vocabulary sets to interact with non-engineers trained in various forms of the design framework

AU  - Abdullah Umair Bajwa
AU  - Abdul Basit Memon
CY  - Baltimore , Maryland
DA  - 2023/06/25
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Consolidating engineering design and design thinking frameworks for teaching design to engineering students at liberal arts universities 
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/42753
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--42753
ER  -