The research objective of this award is to gain a formal understanding of design skills that are critical in early phases of engineering design. The major components of this project are: (1) Enumeration of design skills and their association with specific conceptual design tasks; (2) Characterization of these skills in terms of measurable indicators that are theoretically and empirically verifiable; (3) Study of relationships between sub-factors of different indicators of each skill; (4) Investigation of skill measurement instruments; (5) Evaluation and refinement of measurement instruments using criterion and construct validity checks; (6) Characterization of designer profiles and team profiles in terms of skill sets. This research will connect design research to established cognitive theories of human problem solving and learning, visual and spatial reasoning, pattern recognition and scientific discovery. It seeks to gain insights into how design knowledge is used and what differentiates good designers from ones less skilled.
If successful, the results of this research will improve design education and collaborative team based design. Design exercises and courses could target specific skills or sub-sets of those skills, and the effectiveness of these exercises or courses could be evaluated in an objective manner by tracking changes in designer profiles. Skill based grading would be a radical departure from current grading practices, identifying strengths and weaknesses of individuals explicitly. For forming collaborative design teams in industry, complementary designer profiles could be matched to ensure that the team as a whole has all of the skills deemed essential for the of project that it is to undertake. Since the human designer is the most important element in product development, it is important to gain a fundamental understanding of skill sets possessed by good designers.
