Teaching "Real-World" Design in the Classroom

As required of an ABET-accredited engineering program, one of the senior-level classes in the Syracuse University Bioengineering curriculum is a course in engineering design (Bioengineering Capstone Design). It is clear that industry demands engineering graduates who know how to organize and carry out real-world design efforts. To that end, we exploit regional industry sponsors who bring design challenges to the students and expect design results. The course is taught by a two-member team, a professor and an engineer from industry. Early on in the course the students are instructed in the general principles of good design practice: e.g., interacting with clients, gathering requirements, defining the design inputs, generating the design outputs, verifying the design characteristics and validating the design goals. However, our experience indicates that the process of unbounded design is baffling for most students. Their previous classroom experience has been largely limited to solving well-defined engineering problem sets, which invariably have concise, irrefutable solutions. In such classroom settings the students know how to judge their own results by comparing against the "right answer". Further, while teamwork is a hallmark of some of their classes, they have learned how to compete against each other in the struggle for the highest marks. This contribution explores the challenges of teaching a team of students to approach a problem where the solution is not known a-priori. And of equal importance in our academic setting, establishing a grading scale to succinctly and fairly measure their performance both as members of a functional team as well as individual contributors. A student who learns to excel in this "fuzzy" environment of team design will be better prepared to enter that "real world" that awaits them beyond the familiar role of student. They will enter a world where the traditional engineering tools of logic and knowledge are insufficient to maintain a 40-year career, which is necessarily contingent on grant proposals, design wins, market analysis and even the salesmanship needed to sell a vision. To be successful in that real world requires knowledge that has usually been acquired beyond the traditional classroom. Every successful professor, inventor, lab manager and chief technical officer has learned this skill, but each of us probably learned it by trial and error. The next generation of engineer faces the familiar challenges of miniaturization, integration, new technologies and innovative applications. However, in today's global economy, the winning solutions are necessarily burdened with interdisciplinary expertise, the understanding of global markets and worldwide collaboration. Our role as educators will be to ensure the world is well equipped with engineering talent to not just tackle, but overwhelm the challenges of the next generation. Students participating in real-world design projects and interfacing with successful engineers in industry will be better prepared to contribute and succeed in this changing work environment.