Understanding Human Behaviours in Engineering Design to Aid its Teaching and Research
Date
2020-09-11
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Abstract
The objective of this thesis is to better understand the process of engineering conceptual design in terms of human abilities and behaviours so as to provide insights and improvements in its practice, education and research. The thesis aims to help educators better guide novice designers towards proficiency by allowing for their natural predispositions, if any, and to contribute towards a common theoretical foundation upon which future design research can be conducted. To do this the thesis seeks to identify and understand those predispositions, and to determine their underlying causes where possible. This necessarily involves an outside-of-design multi-disciplinary approach, and includes several facets. Literature in the fields of child development and neuro-psychology are reviewed for their similarities or possible causative links to designer behaviours already elucidated in an initial design-research literature review. This is followed by a self-observation study of the researcher while undertaking an actual design project, to provide any insights or context and to illuminate any aspects that may require further investigation. That study uncovered the extreme importance of lengthy observation of the physical artifact – and of discussing the artifact with others – to successful outcomes for this designer. It lead to a subsequent extended review of the literature in the fields of memory, visualization and spoken language, which provided key information for the completion of near-identical object-learning and design problem-solving models. These models are shown to explain several design behaviours usually disparaged upon by design educators and researchers; they also provide guidelines for dealing with these behaviours and for design learning and instruction generally. These explanations and guidelines form the key contributions of this research. The research is completed by a series of interviews with practicing designers to discern their design approaches, which are found to align with the published literature, this researcher’s own design approach, and the aforementioned models. Finally, it is also found that the models’ paired tenet of observing and conjecturing, aligning with Simon and Schön’s paradigms of recognition and reflection respectively, is likely an essential or core process of design.
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designing, design learning, design teaching, engineering, conceptual design, underlying theory, visualization, verbalization
Citation
Gress, G. R. (2020). Understanding Human Behaviours in Engineering Design to Aid its Teaching and Research (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.