This planning project will develop an innovative strategy to incorporate concepts of design theory and methodology throughout the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) undergraduate engineering curriculum. Elements of the strategy will outline specific pedagogical and programmatic components that address the challenges and opportunities of integrating design throughout an undergraduate engineering curriculum. The strategy will help answer key planning questions such as "How can the various topics in design be organized and addressed throughout an undergraduate experience?" and "How can we modify existing elements of our learning experience to convey concepts of design?" This interdisciplinary project involves faculty and students from each of IIT's engineering colleges, the Institute of Design, the Institute of Psychology, and industry.
The project will be carried out in five phases: 1) Research to gather perspectives; 2) Ethnographic domain analysis of design; 3) Creation of optional strategy elements & prototypes; 4) Evaluation of the strategy elements; and 5) Creation of the final innovative strategy. The project phases will each use an appropriate methodology to ensure productive work and reliable results. The first phase will use ethnographic methods of data collection and analysis to create an understanding of the various ways design is understood and taught across the departments. Conceptualization and prototyping will be used to create alternative elements of the strategy that can be used for critical evaluation. A Delphi technique will be used to assess the alternative elements of the strategy and refine them. The last phase will document the resulting strategy for wider dissemination and in preparation for implementation.
Intellectual Merit The results of this project will contribute to the knowledge of how U.S. engineering curricula, each with diverse constituents and challenging constraints, can more effectively integrate design theory and methods. While the incorporation of more open-ended projects in undergraduate engineering is gaining momentum, simply offering these projects does not guarantee they will lead to strong learning experiences. To avoid that situation, this proposal includes appropriate pedagogical components that teach design theory and methods before, during and after our project, reducing the challenges both for students and instructors and leading to more reliable results.
Broader Impacts This planning project incorporates faculty undergraduate and graduate students in research of pedagogy and the discovery of new approaches that can enhance the engineering education experience. With an innovative strategy to more effectively integrate design theory and methodology, engineering schools have the potential to attract and retain a broader range of constituents. It has been shown that improving the undergraduate engineering learning experience leads to higher recruitment and retention rates of minority groups and women in particular.
