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Experimental Validation of an Improved Design Method

Abstract

Prior investigation found a statistical association between engineering effort aimed at system- level design issues and the quality of design outcomes in senior design projects, but that simply “telling” students to consider system architecture and interface issues in their designs was not effective. We developed a method to help design engineers with this important phase of design, then conducted an experiment involving mechanical engineering students to test its effectiveness. This paper describes the experimental method, presents results, and discusses the implications for engineering education research.

Introduction

In prior research on student design projects, we observed that system-level design effort associates positively with productivity and design quality. System-level design pertains to questions of product or system architecture, configuration, and layout; and as such, provides an important bridge between conceptual design work and detailed design decisions. While prior research indicates that this phase of design seems important to successful outcomes of design processes, it is not well understood and we have not yet established a causal link. To do this, we developed a tool designed to elicit system-level design work from the user. We then conducted an experiment to test whether use of the tool improves design performance among student designers.

Many methods and tools have been developed to teach good practices and assist the design process.1 Existing tools and methods tend to focus on either the front-end tasks of conceptual design, particularly ideation and selection, or on the back-end, such as computer-aided design and analysis tools. However, little is available to guide the phase that bridges concept and detailed design, what we call system-level design. We hope to address this gap.

Interestingly, few of the existing tools and methods have been verified experimentally to validate the superiority of one method over another. It would seem that engineering educators would want to know whether a particular tool has been tested and verified as effective before presenting it to students as good design practice.

Thus, this paper contributes to engineering education on two fronts. First, we provide a method for improving student design processes that has been experimentally validated, which would be of interest to educators interested in engineering design. Second, we describe a cross-over experimental method which can be useful to a broad range of education researchers wanting to test pedagogical tools/methods experimentally. The experimental design has simple but strong internal and external validation indicators, and overcomes some of the ethical issues which often surround experiments in an educational setting.

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Sobek, D., & Ruder, J. (2006, June), Experimental Validation Of An Improved Design Method Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--849