Asee peer logo

Interdisciplinary Design – Forming and Evaluating Teams

Download Paper |

Conference

2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Atlanta, Georgia

Publication Date

June 23, 2013

Start Date

June 23, 2013

End Date

June 26, 2013

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Innovative Teaching in Architectural Engineering

Tagged Division

Architectural

Page Count

16

Page Numbers

23.800.1 - 23.800.16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--19814

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/19814

Download Count

525

Paper Authors

biography

Allen C Estes California Polytechnic State University

visit author page

Allen C. Estes is a Professor and Head for the Architectural Engineering Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Until January 2007, Dr. Estes was the Director of the Civil Engineering Program at the United States Military Academy (USMA). He is a registered Professional Engineer in Virginia. Al Estes received a B.S. degree from USMA in1978, M.S. degrees in Structural Engineering and in Construction Management from Stanford University in 1987 and a Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997.

visit author page

biography

Brent Nuttall P.E. California Polytechnic State University

visit author page

Professor Nuttall has 25 years experience as both a practicing engineer and engineering professor. He is currently a tenured professor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo where his teaching focus is on structural and seismic design for engineers, architects and construction management students. His professional experience includes the design of many high profile new construction and renovation projects including the Getty Villa Museum, Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels, Dodger Stadium Renovation and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Restoration.

visit author page

biography

Jill Nelson P.E. California Polytechnic State University

visit author page

Jill Nelson is an Assistant Professor for the Architectural Engineering Department at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, CA. Professor Nelson came to Cal Poly with over 25 years of structural design and project management experience. She is a registered Professional Engineer and Structural Engineer in the states of California and Washington. Jill Nelson received a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno and a M.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington.

visit author page

biography

Margot Kally McDonald AIA, NCARB, LEED BD+C Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

visit author page

Prof. Margot McDonald has provided leadership to a number of green building, renewable energy, and sustainability initiatives in architectural education and the built environment over the past 20 years during her tenure as an architecture department faculty member at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. In the mid-1990’s, she was part of a design-engineering team that produced a feasibility study for a campus biological solid waste and wastewater treatment facility at Cal Poly, and worked as a consultant with Sasaki and Associates on a Sustainability Master Plan for California State University, Monterey Bay. She participated in the Vital Signs Building Case Study Project throughout its 10-year lifespan. This NSF and Energy Foundation funded curriculum project set standards and provided hands-on training in post-occupancy investigations of building science related questions in historical and contemporary green buildings. She was also an advisor to Agents for Change, a FIPSE-funded initiative, to provide similar training to graduate students in field measurement of building energy performance. More recently her fieldwork includes work on a Getty Foundation grant where she supervised student interns conducting post-disaster record drawings and field investigation of a California mission structure damaged in a 2003 earthquake with a team of experts. Since 2008, she has been part of an interdisciplinary team teaching integrated design to construction management, engineering, landscape and architecture students in an Integrated Project Delivery Studio at Cal Poly.
Prof. McDonald is a former Chair of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) and of the USGBC Formal Education Committee, as well as a member of the California State University Chancellor’s Office Sustainability Advisory Committee for Education and Research. She is the principal author of SEDE – the Sustainable Environmental Design Education Program, a curriculum project for landscape and architecture undergraduate professional education funded through the California Integrated Waste Management Board. Her work has been written about in Ecological Design and Building Schools (Leibowitz, 2005), and Women in Green (Gould and Hosey, 2007).

visit author page

biography

Gregory F. Starzyk JD Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo

visit author page

Assistant Professor Starzyk’s academic background includes a BSCE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MPM at Northwestern University, and a JD with scholastic merit at the Taft University Law School. He arrived at Cal Poly in 2009 after four years at East Carolina University. For 23 years prior, he worked for UOP, an Illinois-based research and engineering company that provides process technology, products, and construction management services to refiners and petrochemical plants worldwide. He has held design engineering and various business management positions with accountabilities in planning, construction management, project management, and contract negotiation.
The classes he has taught include Construction Law, Construction Accounting, Project Controls, Heavy Civil Construction, Human Resource Management, Integrated Project Delivery, and an Interdisciplinary Project Management Studio. His research agenda is focused upon building a model for organizational behavior in the built environment that facilitates the integration of knowledge.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

Interdisciplinary Design – Forming and Evaluating TeamsThe College of Architecture and Environmental Design at xx University is the onlycollege in the nation that has departments of Architecture, Architectural Engineering andConstruction Management in the same college. The institution has a 60 year tradition ofcollaboration between the engineering, architecture and construction disciplines,particularly at the lower division level. To enhance this collaboration, the collegecommitted to providing an upper division, interdisciplinary experience for every studentin the form of a project based, team oriented five unit studio laboratory that every studentwould take. The course is now in its fifth year and requires small teams of architecture,engineering and construction students to complete the schematic level design of an actualbuilding for a real client.The course has two learning objectives which create a dynamic tension and compete foremphasis on how the course is executed:1. Create an integrated building design that includes a sound project approach (scope/budget/quality & constructability) including land-use, site development, architectural vision, space planning, and the integration/synthesis of building systems.2. Function effectively on an interdisciplinary team:The second objective directly supports ABET program criterion 3d, the ability to functionas a member of an interdisciplinary team. The first objective has been relatively easy toassess as reported in previous papers 1, 2. The rubric for the intermediate and final designsubmissions allows the product to be subdivided into clear increments such asarchitectural plan, structural system, site plan, cost estimate, etc. Each are given a scoreproviding a reliable direct measure of student performance. The second objective ismuch tougher to assess. The quality of the design product does not necessarily reflect thequality of the team. Team performance is as dependent on group dynamics, humanbehavior, leadership, cooperation, shared work effort and organization as it is on theknowledge and performance of individuals.This paper focuses on the selection and assessment of teams in this course. Variouspersonality and skills assessments are completed and used in the formations of teams. Arubric is developed to define the aspects of what constitutes a good team and severalexercises are embedded within the course to directly isolate and measure the performanceof a team. The quality of the product and the group presentation becomes a secondarymeasure of team performance.Bibliography1 Nelson, J, Nuttall, B and Estes, AC “Interdisciplinary Design – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” Paper2010-1004 2010 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings, ASEE, Louisville, June 20-23,2010.2 Nuttall, B, Nelson, J and Estes, AC “Interdisciplinary Design – The Saga Continues” ASEE AnnualConference and Exposition Proceedings, ASEE, Vancouver, British Columbia, June 26-29, 2011.

Estes, A. C., & Nuttall, B., & Nelson, J., & McDonald, M. K., & Starzyk, G. F. (2013, June), Interdisciplinary Design – Forming and Evaluating Teams Paper presented at 2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia. 10.18260/1-2--19814

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2013 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015