By Sheri D. Sheppard

In the past decade, there has been a gradual movement toward making design both the cornerstone and capstone of the engineering curriculum, and to teach the subject in all four years. Educators have come to realize that design cannot be taught in one course; it is an experience that must grow with the student's development.

Students in a Mechanical Dissection class at Stanford University set about rebuilding bicycles.

At the same time, companies like Boeing and professional organizations like the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology have taken an aggressive stand as to what they need and expect from engineering graduates. The important attributes include a good grasp of engineering science fundamentals, a basic understanding of the context in which engineering is practiced, good communication skills, an ability to think both critically and creatively—independently and cooperatively—and curiosity and a desire to learn—for life.

To see how design education is being reshaped, we will look at innovations in core design classes, in mechatronics, and in the use of design exercises in "traditional" classes. Engineering schools across the country are engaged in excellent design experiments. The selected examples are presented so that readers can gain a better understanding of the changes in design education and see an opportunity to get involved, and so that those who are directly responsible for teaching mechanical engineering design may find a few new ideas.

Engineering design education is generally focused on helping students develop into effective design practitioners. According to Clive Dym of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., "Engineering design is the systematic, intelligent generation and evaluation of specifications for artifacts whose form and function achieve stated objectives and satisfy specified constraints ... The problems that engineering design responds to are typically open-ended and underdefined, by which we mean that, respectively, there are usually many acceptable solutions to a design problem (so uniqueness does not apply); and solutions for design problems cannot normally be found by routinely applying a mathematical formula in a structured way."

MIT's Larry Bucciarelli said that the ability to solve design problems effectively "requires not just the analytical competence to size a structural member, to select an appropriate material, or to determine a deflected shape, but, more importantly, the know-how to formulate a problem in a way that is in tune with the resources at one's disposal; so, too, it requires knowledge of fabrication techniques, a sensitivity to costs, tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, [knowledge of] how to ask the right questions of a supplier and the ability to negotiate with others, even the corporate lawyer or the firm's marketing manager. Design, in this general sense, is what engineers do most of their waking, professional hours."

Design engages both the intellect and the imagination of the designer. Many of the qualities that an engineer needs in order to work as an effective mechanical designer are listed in Table 1. Each quality is comprised of competencies and attitudes. Competencies are the skills necessary to carry out the mechanics of a particular quality. "Attitudes" refers to the mental outlook or feeling an engineer has about the importance of a quality in carrying out a job, and encompass beliefs and the behavior known as "buy-in." A skilled design engineer knows how and when to draw upon the qualities in Table 1 to move the process forward.

In contrast to engineering design, where the objective is an "artifact," design education is primarily focused on students, and on helping them understand and experience the process and methods of realizing an artifact. The quality of the student-created artifact is often less important than the student's understanding of the process by which the artifact was designed and created. Engineering educators believe that students should understand how to generate design specifications and how to proceed from design specifications to a final artifact by establishing objectives and criteria, generating alternatives, synthesizing, analyzing, constructing, testing, and evaluating. The qualities listed in Table 1 should be a major part of the process of design education.

Larry Leifer of Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., has offered the notions that design education is a social activity, that learning to design requires becoming comfortable with ambiguity, and that all education is reeducation.

For decades, mechanical engineering undergraduate programs have culminated in a capstone design project. This final experience in the program has represented an opportunity for students to synthesize techniques and knowledge that they have acquired over their first three years of study.

Some faculty members used to feel that students were incapable of engaging in design in a meaningful way until their understanding of the physical world (and their ability to perform analysis) had reached a critical mass. This feeling has generally been replaced with the realization that students need to practice design, just like analysis, to become competent, and that one experience at the end of a four-year program is not enough. Students are capable of engaging in design, even on the first day of their freshmen year. Of course, the sophistication and complexity of the design problems should increase over the four years of study (as should expectations on the quality and completeness of their solutions). Furthermore, spreading the design experiences over four years may positively affect student performance and motivation in analysis classes.

Capstone courses have evolved over the last decade to engage industrial partners more formally, to base project selection on a well-defined set of criteria, to acknowledge that teaching these courses is unlike a traditional lecture course, to develop offerings that are interdisciplinary, and to use the internet as one means of communications.

A number of freshman-level courses have been created over the last five to 10 years that have a process orientation and utilize team-based learning. We will discuss two complementary ways of introducing students to many of the design qualities listed in Table 1. The first of these ways is to have students study the artifacts and design processes of others, while the second has students doing design themselves. (Of course, it is entirely possible to combine these two approaches in a single course.)

The study of the artifacts made and the processes used by others is broadly labeled "case-based learning." One example is a course called "Mechanical Dissection" which was initiated for freshman and sophomore students at Stanford in the fall of 1990. This course aims to help students gain confidence in their ability to work with, build up, and manipulate mechanisms and machines. Examples of devices that students disassemble and reassemble in class include bicycles, electric drills, windup toys, sewing machines, engines, and computer printers.

Dissection courses are not remedial; they challenge students to figure out how things work, and are highly motivating. In each of the exercises students become "users" of the device, identifying all aspects of its external functionality. They record the form and function of the device in a personal log book, map external-to-internal functionality, answer specific questions related to assembly or maintenance, propose design improvements, and participate in formal and informal presentations.

Similar dissection courses have been initiated at, for example, North Carolina State University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Washington. Kristin Wood of the University of Texas and Kevin Otto of MIT have formalized the method in a textbook entitled Product Design: Techniques in Reverse Engineering, Systematic Design, and New Product Development (Prentice-Hall, 1999).

Another approach to giving freshmen experience with engineering design is to develop a course principally centered on one or several multiweek design projects. This has been done at the University of Maryland, Arizona State University, Ohio State University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvey Mudd College, University of Colorado, and University of Wisconsin.

These multiweek design-project courses aim to provide freshmen with an understanding of the profession (qualities 6, 7, and 12 in Table 1), a creative learning environment and positive attitude (qualities 5, 12, and 13), skills for team-based problem solving (qualities 2 and 13), and an appreciation of the need to be communicators (qualities 1 and 4). Examples of these projects include a robot arm for dispensing dog food, a chalkboard eraser for the handicapped, playground swing sets and seesaws, and solar desalination stills. These courses generally take a "holistic" approach to design education by having students experience that design is more than a project, more than teamwork, more than an oral presentation, more than analysis, and more than creativity—it is a comprehensive and professional endeavor.

The reader should not get the impression that all of these courses, with their multiweek project focus and similar intent, are carbon copies of one another. There are, in fact, major variations in the courses with regard to where the projects come from (for example, from industry, university, research lab, or nonprofit organization?), what the projects produce (a technical report, working hardware, or engineering drawings), whether all groups are working on the same or different projects, who the coaches and mentors are (industry liaisons, upperclassmen, faculty, or graduate students), the extent to which design methodologies are formally taught to students, and feedback to students (exams, quizzes, individual or group grade).

The few studies that have assessed the effectiveness of multiweek design projects in terms of student retention and skill development for freshmen show positive results.

Several programs have developed design threads throughout the four years. These programs have recognized that students need to practice design. The College of Engineering at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., has implemented an eight-semester, 24-credit course taken by all engineering students from each of its four engineering departments (mechanical, electrical and computer engineering, civil, and chemical). The main focus of the eight-semester sequence is design. Each course in the design sequence is team-taught by faculty from more than one department, and students work in multidisciplinary teams. The courses emphasize the use of modern engineering tools, such as Quality Function Deployment, computer-aided design, and stereolithography.

At Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the Design4Practice program, which was begun in the early 1990s, consists of four design courses over a student's four-year career. Northern Arizona and the Design4Practice project were both recently recognized with the prestigious 1999 Boeing Outstanding Education Award.

Integrated, multiyear design courses have also been created at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, the University of Washington, Clemson University in South Carolina, and West Virginia University, as well as at Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark. At Clemson and West Virginia, students work on the same case study from different perspectives in five courses spanning the sophomore to senior years (for example, designing and understanding a process for separating ethanol from water in a distillation column).

A growing number of mechanical engineering programs are recognizing the need to educate their students not only in the "facts" of mechanical engineering and their application, but also about the application of software and electronics in design solutions. This combined area is called mechatronics. Ed Carryer, a consulting associate professor at Stanford, said, "The strength of a mechatronic solution, as opposed to a Ôtraditional' solution, lies in the synergistic combination of the capabilities represented by the parent fields of mechanics, electronics, and software. To educate mechatronics engineers requires that they gain a depth of knowledge of all three disciplines that will allow them to effectively perform that synthesis. Mechatronics is all about integration."

A sophomore course at Georgia Institute of Technology requires mechanical engineering students to build electromechanical devices using a standard microcontroller (BASIC Stamp II) and other "plug-and-play" components, such as dc motors, solenoids, and micro-switches. The focus is on learning to work with real hardware and to understand that there is a significant difference between a paper design and the real thing.

Since 1978, Stanford has offered a mechatronics course to graduate students in mechanical engineering. The Smart Product Design series is currently a four-quarter sequence of classes that teach electrical engineering, computer science, and systems engineering to mechanical engineering students. More than five years ago, undergraduates who were familiar with the graduate course began to ask that a similar course be offered at their level. Launched in 1994, the 10-week senior-level course consists of four hours of formal lectures and four laboratory assignments a week. Lectures are focused on preparing students to execute an ambitious, open-ended, team design project in the last four weeks of the course.

The qualities listed in Table 1 are also being developed and nurtured in an increasing number of classes that do not fall under the label of "design classes." (For lack of a better label, these can be called "traditional classes.") This change is cause for celebration for design educators. While it does not lessen faculty responsibilities, it does give students additional opportunities to develop and practice design-related qualities (skills and attitudes). These courses are dominated by well-defined, domain-specific objectives that have been complemented by open-ended problem solving. Collaboration is encouraged, but the majority of the student's evaluation is based on individual homework assignments and tests.

Students at Stanford participating in a "Delta Design" exercise as part of a Strength of Materials lab session.

Examples of traditional courses that have been influenced by design principles include "Harvard Calculus" (also known as the Calculus Consortium based at Harvard), Larry Bucciarelli's textbook and course on the statics and strength of materials, and the introduction to graphics course at Iowa State University.

More than 300 universities, colleges, and community colleges have adopted Harvard Calculus. Products of this project include a textbook (Calculus, by Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Andrew M. Gleason, et al; John Wiley, 1997) and annual workshops on teaching calculus using the new approach. The Harvard Calculus work directly addresses qualities 1, 2, 4, and 9 from Table 1.

Design projects are being integrated into statics and strength of materials courses at the University of Maryland and North Carolina State University. For example, at North Carolina State, students work throughout the term to design a roof truss, a construction crane, and a scissors crane while concurrently learning the underlying mechanics principles. Design solutions are presented by the student design teams to the whole class, and judges (made up of Professional Engineers, engineering faculty, and senior students) evaluate the presentations. This approach is particularly effective in addressing qualities 1,2, 9, and 12 from Table 1.

At Stanford, a laboratory section that parallels the more traditional strength of materials lectures has been introduced. In the lab, students engage in short design exercises such as Delta Design (by Bucciarelli of MIT), that help illustrate the roles of analysis in supporting design. Delta Design is a design game in which team members, playing the roles of structural analyst, architect, heat transfer analyst, and project manager, work toward designing a house for the two-dimensional world, using red and blue equilateral triangles. In this two-hour exercise, team members learn to negotiate to resolve conflicting constraints, and to see the particular constraints of their individual disciplines in the context of the overall design.

The graphics course at Iowa State University, which resulted from National Science Foundation support, uses three major projects and several individual practice exercises to develop knowledge and skills in graphics (that is, sketching and geometric modeling capabilities) necessary to perform effectively in a design environment. The graphics course addresses qualities 1, 2, 4, and 12 from Table 1. Furthermore, the course puts particular emphasis on qualities 5, 7, and 14. Similar graphics courses have been developed at Hampton University in Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley with NSF funding. Design projects are also being integrated into statics and strength of materials courses at the University of Maryland.

At this point, the reader may be wondering which of the approaches to introducing design and design qualities is best for educating a mechanical engineer. For example, is it better to introduce these qualities in a single freshman design class or to integrate them into more traditional classes? To answer this and similar questions, each school needs to look at its faculty, student body, resources, facilities, industrial partners, and goals to define its "optimum" in terms of a meaningful four-year design experience for its students.

The reader may also be wondering how to get more involved in the design education of future engineers. If you work in industry, you are urged to sponsor design projects, serve on university or departmental industrial advisory committees, or volunteer to give a guest lecture at a student chapter of ASME. If you work in academia, you are urged to get involved with the growing community of educators who are discussing and debating the education of future mechanical designers.

The creation, implementation, and maintenance of a design curriculum is in fact a design problem. There is no universal or timeless solution. The faculty and industry partners of each school need to develop their own appropriate solution. Of course, borrowing ideas and innovations is encouraged.


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