Classifying Student Engineering Design Project Types

13 Classifying Student Engineering Design Project Types Micah Lande and Larry Leifer Center for Design Research Stanford University Abstract Mechanical Engineering 310 is a graduate-level product-learning-based mechanical engineering design course at Stanford University that takes its project prompts from sponsoring companies in industry. In the past 30 years, over 325 projects have been presented and worked on by students teams. The nature of these projects has shifted over time from -focused and Test/-focused projects to standalone -focused and Human-centered design products and systems. This paper classifies project types and characterizes maps this change over time. Introduction Mechanical Engineering 310 Global Team-Based Design Innovation with Corporate Partners is a year-long, graduate-level product-based learning 1 engineering design course based at Stanford University. It is a core course for many students pursuing a Mechanical Engineering Master s Degree with an emphasis on Design Theory and Methodology. The course has projects sponsored by industry and pairs up teams of students at Stanford with similar teams of students at other global universities. Most students come from an undergraduate experience in Mechanical Engineering. As part of their ABET-approved programs they experienced a capstone design course 2 allowing them to synthesize what they learned in their programs. For researchers at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, ME310 has long been a laboratory and test bed for design research. 3 Much study has been devoted to how designers design, how they work in teams and tools that can help along the way. Forerunners of ME310 (also labeled ME210, E210, E310) date back, in its current form, to at least 1972. CDR was established in 1985 and research in ME310 has been going on near 25 years. Technology and the expanding appreciation of what design and design thinking can tackle has changed the scope and type of engineering design projects worked on in the course. This paper classifies project types and characterizes this change over time. Corporate Project Prompts as a Start The yearly slate of projects offered in ME310 are wholly dependent on companies from industry proposing and underwriting project proposals. A dedicated course developer solicits and manages the process. Faculty and staff help edit project prompts for scope and appropriateness to the course pedagogy. Student teams are presented with the array of possible topics, rank their choices and are then assigned to them in a satisficing 4 approach. The course is structured to give student teams both the time and freedom to explore their problem-solution space and a safe support system from which to learn how to step through a

14 design process. Weekly meetings with the course faculty and teaching assistants as well as having a paired industry coach help teams progress. Course milestones are geared towards hands-on prototyping early and students are pushed to work collaboratively with their design team counterparts globally. Documentation and Pre-ion Prototype as a Finish Assessment of work is heavily weighted on documentation produced throughout the academic year as evidence of the students thinking. A final report of a couple hundred pages is generated in the spring and includes the design problem, requirements, design development and specifications for the end solution. It is prototyped by precursors in the fall and winter. Student teams have project funds of at least $15,000 and oftentimes outsource part of the fabrication or finish of their final system. The expectation is that their engineered deliverable be a pre-production prototype a proof of concept that functions as desired with a lot of consideration as to how it would be manufactured. Types of Projects For a mechanical engineering course, understandably, much of what is produced is a physical, tangible artifact. There are oftentimes components or whole sub-systems that are not mechanical designed but rather include software or mechatronics. Mabogunje 5 examined ME310 projects in the 1991-1992 and 1992-1993 course cycles. He was able to define 3 types of projects: manufacturing process driven machine design, product driven machine design, and a hybrid of the two, a mixed product and process driven machine design (Table 1). Table 1 Types of ME310 Projects by Mabogunje 5 Coding Schema used here process driven machine design... Process Mixed product & process driven machine design... Test/ for Assessment driven machine design... Human-centered design products Historically this has been able to capture the distribution of project types. With a rise in a humancentered design approach, industry seeking design to solve a wider range of problems and more future-oriented projects, there is a need to introduce a new category of projects that go past the systems optimization and system design but take readily into account the presence of a user engaged in the designed system. It is then necessary to add the category of Human-centered design products on top of those that deal mostly with manufacturing process, tests/ tools for assessment and standalone products.

15 Mapping to Ways of Thinking Framework Previous attempts by the authors to classify student activities in the ME310 course has produced a working framework modeling Ways of Thinking 6 accessed by engineering students. As shown in Figure 1, it is visually represented as a matrix showing relative position of Design Thinking, Engineering Thinking, ion Thinking, and Future Thinking. Along the Y-axis is a spectrum of incremental innovation to breakthrough innovation. 7 Along the X-axis it is measured in time, short-term to long-term. The activity of Design Thinking 8 can be to solve a problem with the end results being an idea created. For Engineering Thinking 9 10 making a solution results in an artifact or stuff. ion Thinking 11 allows for the remaking of a solution with the results being facsimiles of stuff or plans by which to make copies. Future Thinking 12 allows one to reset the problem with the outcome being a question. Human Figure 1 Ways of Thinking Framework for Engineering Design Projects This maps very closely to the Test Human-centered design product coding schema. Figure 1 highlights where these descriptions fall on the Ways of Thinking framework. Results in Classifying Projects A survey of 30 years of ME310 projects from AY 1978 to AY 2008 was made. (For the purposes of simplicity academic years are noted by the ending year. AY 2008-2009, for example, would be noted at 2009.) The project title presented at the end of the year was noted and collated. A qualitative coding scheme (listed in Table 1) was applied to classify these projects for their emphasis on a) manufacturing process, b) a test or tool for assessment, c) stand alone product and d) a human-centered product. Over this time period there were 329 projects with the lowest number of project in any year being 5 (in 1978) and the highest number being 16 (in 1988). The average number of project per year was approximately 11. The distribution of project types is shown in Table 2.

16 Table 2 Distribution of Project Type by Year Year Process Test/ for Assessment Humancentered design product Total 78 2 3 5 79 1 4 1 6 80 2 3 4 9 81 1 2 6 9 82 3 5 2 10 83 2 4 1 7 84 3 6 2 11 85 4 7 3 14 86 2 5 6 13 87 3 7 4 14 88 3 9 4 16 89 3 3 5 11 90 3 6 4 13 91 3 4 5 12 92 5 3 5 13 93 3 4 5 12 94 2 4 9 15 95 4 4 6 14 96 1 6 5 1 13 97 4 10 14 98 2 6 8 99 1 8 9 00 1 7 8 01 1 7 8 02 7 2 9 03 6 6 04 9 9 05 1 8 9 06 4 6 10 07 4 7 11 08 1 6 4 11 total 329 To better visualize the shifting pattern over time the data table was graphed and color coded. In Figure 2 below, from bottom to top in each column, are noted Human-centered design (blue), product (red), test (yellow) and manufacturing (green) projects. The share of projects has shifted over the years. -focused projects have become less common and Human-centered design projects more so. -focused project have also declined while -focused projects have grown slightly and fluctuated in recent years.

17 16 14 12 number of projects 10 8 6 4 2 Human 0 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 Human Projects Projects Project Projects Figure 2 Distribution of Project Types from 1978-2008 ME310 courses As way of further illustration, Table 3 shows example project content from 3 years of different eras: 1979, 1999, 2006. Projects from 1979 Design steam leak measurement system High-speed Kevlar wrapper Arm ergometer Low-cost facsimile printer Universal gas seal Robotic arm controller Table 3 Selected ME310 Project Content (1979, 1999, 2006) Projects from 1999 Driver scanning automatic car door Innovative composite crutch Key fob Smart bed Parallel parking assistive system Shift simulator Power expendable towing mirror Inspection device for detection of contaminated blades Projects from 2006 Artificial car co-pilot Spherical image display Enhancing passenger communication Intuitive remote control Reinventing rear seat entertainment Future blood glucose meters Making air conditioning personal Tactile touch screen Car shifting system Wireless power steering Projects from 1979 have a propensity of and Test projects. Project titles have terms like low cost and high speed. Projects selected from 1999 still mostly fall into projects. Examples there are systems like Smart Bed and Car Door projects. Projects from 2006 more recently show a human-centered Design approach. There are still a small number of projects like Car Shifting System or pulling power wirelessly from a steering wheel, but most are

18 with a project centered on people in a car. An interesting thing to note for future exploration is the number of and human-centered Design focused projects that ask students to look into the future for the solution space or technology solutions. These include the role of the Artificial Copilot of 2020, Future Blood Glucose Meter and an example of a future display spherical surface. Figure 3 shows the gross distribution of project types within these example years of 1979, 1999 and 2006. Human Projects Projects Human Project Projects 1979 1999 2006 Figure 3 Distribution of Project Types by Percentage from 1979, 1999 and 2006 Example Years Conclusions and Next Steps This survey classification of past projects is helpful to get at the gross trends over a number of years. It is instructive and informative to see patterns in the focus of project prompts from industry for student work. Being more mindful of the evolving types of projects pursued is helpful. This is tempered by both an awareness and concern that established pedagogies for -focused projects is different than for -focused and user-centered Design-focused projects. Questions arise too then about the student s steps through the design process. Is the process different for projects of different types and how so? The question is left unaddressed here. In this analysis where ME310 projects end up has been captured but the company prompt and where the student teams have taken the projects is not matched. The next step is to closely examine more complete records from sets of projects to understand the relationship. It s useful to define and characterize such variables as the types of projects posed in courses like ME310 in order to be more explicit and reasonable about the expectations from the student, faculty and industry sponsor perspectives. Acknowledgements This work was supported by the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program.

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