The Design Firm Model as Applied to Capstone Design

Chelsea Salinas; Joel Bach; Megan Sanders

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: DEED Technical Session 3 Capstone Design
Page Count: 18
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41188
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41188
Download Count: 296

Paper Authors

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Chelsea Salinas Colorado School of Mines

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Chelsea Salinas is a Teaching Associate Professor in Engineering, Design and Society with more than 10 years of experience teaching in the fields of design for people with disabilities, biomedical engineering, biodesign, material science, chemical engineering and first year engineering design. Dr. Salinas earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and her MS and PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to joining Mines, she served as a Lecturer in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and as an Instructor in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Salinas is interested in teaching design thinking strategies across the freshman and senior levels. She is passionate about design for people with disabilities, creating an engaging classroom, using active learning techniques and integrating user-centered design approaches to create a targeted and meaningful experience for her students.

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Joel Bach Colorado School of Mines

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Megan Sanders Colorado School of Mines

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Megan is the Senior Assessment Associate in the Trefny Innovative Instruction Center at Colorado School of Mines.

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Abstract

As the culminating experience in an engineering program, capstone design provides students a glimpse into real-world design. Yet, real-world problems are complicated and dynamic. How, then, can we push the boundaries of successful capstone design programs to encapsulate an experience that more directly mimics the complexities and diversities that exist in professional practice? We propose a model for capstone design that more closely approximates professional engineering practice with students working on multiple projects, each on a distinct timeline and each with a different team of participants. The Human Centered Design Studio (HCDS) at the (school name) has been refining a ‘Job Shop Approach’ to capstone in an environment dedicated to implementation of a design firm model with students working on multiple projects at different stages of development. A recent study of our student experience and overall course assessment provided opportunities for reflection on areas for continued growth. Within HCDS, the dynamic nature of the design studio allows for project timelines that do not align neatly with the academic calendar. Students serve simultaneously on three different projects over the course of two semesters, providing a multi-project, multi-team, multi-client, and varied timeline learning experience. Similar to traditional capstone models, HCDS student teams work through the design process in its entirety, just not with a single project or in consecutive order. Instead, HCDS revolves around fluidity of team entry onto a project, where a new cohort takes over a project midstream. The studio model breaks down the design process into seven distinct steps, and every student completes each of these steps; however, the steps are typically distributed over multiple projects. Each step of the design process is linked to a specific course learning outcome, ensuring that the students meet all course requirements despite working on different projects at different stages of design development and in a non-consecutive order. This model has provided an educational experience more closely resembling an engineering design firm with varying project progression, timelines, and teammates. Capturing the learning outcomes associated with design-phase steps, instead of assuming all steps are completed as students work on a single project from start to finish, allows for a stronger focus on the design process as the central learning element, instead of the idiosyncrasies of any project or client, which become secondary concerns. This paper presents the HCDS model for introducing and managing design project complexity in a team-based project course. The establishment of learning outcomes in association with steps in an educational design process creates a reliable and repeatable means for assessing students, but more importantly this reformulation greatly enhances the student experience. We provide an overview of our definition and implementation of our capstone design studio model with a focus on program structure and how it manifests in student requirements, deliverables and project management. This study also focuses on student experience as assessed via pre and post semester surveys. Exploration into model achievements and limitations are discussed. We also discuss the institutional forces that enable and constrain our innovative approach and explore how the HCDS model can be exported to other institutional contexts .

Citation
Format

Salinas, C., & Bach, J., & Sanders, M. (2022, August), The Design Firm Model as Applied to Capstone Design Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41188

TY - CPAPER
AB - As the culminating experience in an engineering program, capstone design provides students a glimpse into real-world design. Yet, real-world problems are complicated and dynamic. How, then, can we push the boundaries of successful capstone design programs to encapsulate an experience that more directly mimics the complexities and diversities that exist in professional practice? We propose a model for capstone design that more closely approximates professional engineering practice with students working on multiple projects, each on a distinct timeline and each with a different team of participants. The Human Centered Design Studio (HCDS) at the (school name) has been refining a ‘Job Shop Approach’ to capstone in an environment dedicated to implementation of a design firm model with students working on multiple projects at different stages of development. A recent study of our student experience and overall course assessment provided opportunities for reflection on areas for continued growth.
Within HCDS, the dynamic nature of the design studio allows for project timelines that do not align neatly with the academic calendar. Students serve simultaneously on three different projects over the course of two semesters, providing a multi-project, multi-team, multi-client, and varied timeline learning experience. Similar to traditional capstone models, HCDS student teams work through the design process in its entirety, just not with a single project or in consecutive order. Instead, HCDS revolves around fluidity of team entry onto a project, where a new cohort takes over a project midstream. The studio model breaks down the design process into seven distinct steps, and every student completes each of these steps; however, the steps are typically distributed over multiple projects. Each step of the design process is linked to a specific course learning outcome, ensuring that the students meet all course requirements despite working on different projects at different stages of design development and in a non-consecutive order. This model has provided an educational experience more closely resembling an engineering design firm with varying project progression, timelines, and teammates. Capturing the learning outcomes associated with design-phase steps, instead of assuming all steps are completed as students work on a single project from start to finish, allows for a stronger focus on the design process as the central learning element, instead of the idiosyncrasies of any project or client, which become secondary concerns.
This paper presents the HCDS model for introducing and managing design project complexity in a team-based project course. The establishment of learning outcomes in association with steps in an educational design process creates a reliable and repeatable means for assessing students, but more importantly this reformulation greatly enhances the student experience. We provide an overview of our definition and implementation of our capstone design studio model with a focus on program structure and how it manifests in student requirements, deliverables and project management. This study also focuses on student experience as assessed via pre and post semester surveys. Exploration into model achievements and limitations are discussed. We also discuss the institutional forces that enable and constrain our innovative approach and explore how the HCDS model can be exported to other institutional contexts .
AU - Chelsea Salinas
AU - Joel Bach
AU - Megan Sanders
CY - Minneapolis, MN
DA - 2022/08/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - The Design Firm Model as Applied to Capstone Design
UR - https://peer.asee.org/41188
DO - 10.18260/1-2--41188
ER -