How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning.

/pdf/engineering-design-thinking-teaching-and-learning-4yluxw1hth.pdf

Engineering design thinking, teaching, and learning

In this paper we report on an in-depth study of engineering design processes. Specifically, we extend our previous research on engineering student design processes to compare the design behavior of students and expert engineers. Nineteen experts from a variety of engineering disciplines and industries each designed a playground in a lab setting, and gave verbal reports of their thoughts during the design task. Measures of their design processes and solution quality were compared to pre-existing data from 26 freshmen and 24 seniors. The experts spent significantly more time on the task overall and in each stage of engineering design, including significantly more time problem scoping. The experts also gathered significantly more information covering more categories. Results support the argument that problem scoping and information gathering are major differences between advanced engineers and students, and important competencies for engineering students to develop. Timeline representations of the expert designers' processes illustrate characteristic distinctions we found and may help students gain insights into their own design processes.

Engineering Design Processes: A Comparison of Students and Expert Practitioners

Education is fundamentally about values, but we have a great deal of difficulty talking about values. In the United States now, we rarely teach Philosophy of Education or History of Education, because people would disagree too much. There is a local joke in the United States called the “Jesse Test”: You could never, in the United States, come up with a curriculum that would please: Jesse Helms, a conservative Southern senator; Jesse Jackson, a fiery, African American leader; and Jesse Ventura the wrestler-turned governor of Minnesota. And therefore, we simply don’t talk about values.

Five Minds for the Future

Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution.

We are reporting results and experiences from an experimental study conducted to study the nature of design information reuse during redesign. Starting with a detailed study of the questioning behavior of two designers, we have developed a framework for understanding the character and the basic constitution of information that should be recorded during design for the reuse process to be useful and productive. This study lays the ground work for future work in recording, characterizing and indexing design information as it is generated during the design process.

An Experimental Study of Design Information Reuse

Noun Phrases As Surrogates for Measuring Early Phases of the Mechanical Design Process

This paper aims to increase our understanding of concept generation through interpersonal interactions in a design team. Prior research has either looked into the inter-relations between concepts generated, or into identifying specific interpersonal response behaviors. There is a lack of explanation of how design concepts are generated moment-to-moment from the interpersonal interactions between designers. This paper presents the development of a visual notation called the Interaction Dynamics Notation for representing moment-to-moment concept generation through interpersonal interactions. This notation was developed through a video-observation study conducted with two teams each consisting of three engineering design graduate students engaged in a concept generation activity. Collective improvisation was used to bridge concept generation and interpersonal behaviors into a single point of view for developing the notation. The patterns of interaction revealed by the visual notation are described and the value of the notation as a representation system is discussed.

/pdf/a-visual-representation-to-characterize-moment-to-moment-4givss3fxk.pdf

A Visual Representation to Characterize Moment to Moment Concept Generation in Design Teams

In response to the need for increased effectivity in global product development, the Polhem Laboratory at Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, and the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, USA, have created the concept of Distributed Team Innovation (DTI). The overall aim of the DTI framework is to decrease the negative impact of geographic distance on product development efforts and to further enhance current advantages of worldwide, multidisciplinary collaboration. The DTI framework uses a three-layered approach to the advancement of global collaboration; with product development, education, and research in dynamic and synergetic interaction. From our preliminary findings, we believe that the approach we have taken in the DTI initiative will make significant contributions to meet current challenges of distributed product development.

/pdf/distributed-team-innovation-a-framework-for-distributed-4ix47qxcor.pdf

Distributed team innovation : a framework for distributed product development

Concept generation, an activity in which a number of design concepts are generated for further evaluation through prototyping and testing, is an important stage in the engineering design process. In design practice and design education, concept generation is often conducted in teams. During this activity, designers interact with one another to generate a number of design concepts. Prior research has either looked into the inter-relations between concepts generated, or into identifying specific interpersonal response behaviors in teams. There is a lack of explanation of how design concepts are generated moment-to-moment from the interpersonal interactions between designers. This paper presents the development of a visual notation called the Interaction Dynamics Notation for representing moment-to-moment concept generation through interpersonal interactions. This notation was developed through a video-observation study conducted with two engineering design teams engaged in a concept generation activity. Col...

Ade Mabogunje

Papers

An Experimental Study of Design Information Reuse

Noun Phrases As Surrogates for Measuring Early Phases of the Mechanical Design Process

A Visual Representation to Characterize Moment to Moment Concept Generation in Design Teams

Distributed team innovation : a framework for distributed product development

Developing a visual representation to characterize moment-to-moment concept generation in design teams