Abstract: “Design is what engineers do, and the intelligent and thoughtful decision of the engineering curriculum should be the community’s first allegiance.” Yet, we find that engineering design only underpins a small selection of undergraduate courses in a typical engineering curriculum; diminishing the importance of the activity in engineering education. Comparatively, design is a ubiquitous activity in engineering company settings—the foundational work driving much of the activity being conducted by professional engineers. We posit that understanding professional engineering design practices, will help us to inform how to frame our design courses within engineering education and better prepare our budding engineers to be effective practitioners.
In the field of engineering education, there is a lack of research on professional engineering work. Engineering education is often organized against the backdrop of claims about what professional engineering work is like without fully understanding the “work” of professional engineers. This makes it nearly impossible for engineering educators to know whether or not engineering education is preparing engineering students adequately to enter the workforce upon graduation. Actual observations of professional engineering work are critical resources for rethinking engineering education and making college-wide decisions on curriculum.
Engineering design is a complex process that has been simplified to embrace a systematic loop, which can be easily taught to students and utilized by professionals. It is well recognized that simplified design loops do not represent all aspects of design, and research in engineering education has addressed complexities; even so, there remain aspects of the design process that need further research. In particular, understanding how engineering design is shaped by factors like institutional and organizational structure.
Our prior work has led us to believe that design aspects like space and time organize the entire design process and need to be consider when planning and executing project. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that engineering design is a truly social process. This idea of design as a social process has been discussed prior, such in the work of Bucciarelli and Trevelyan. Design work gets done though constant negotiations between people as well as the combined cognitive power of a team along with all of their resources.
Throughout a two-year ethnographic study of university and professional engineering design teams, we investigate how phenomena like space, technical coordination, relationships, and organizational structure play important roles in creating a design experience. This paper solely focuses on the professional engineering companies observed in the study, and offers suggestions on how these findings can translate into considerations for engineering education. Our intent is that this research add to the body of literature seeking to understand the complexities of engineering design and allows us to rethink how critical, yet subtle components are used to frame and scaffold the design process. It also identifies how differences in organizational structure can impact the approach to the design process as well as the design work setting. We challenge engineering educators to determine what experience they want students to gain and then to implement necessary changes to create this type of design environment.
Lauff, C., O’Connor, K., Kotys-Schwartz, D., Rentschler, M.E., “Comparing Organizational Structures: Two Case Studies of Engineering Companies,” ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Seattle, WA, June, 2015.