Representation in design: data from engineering journals

Since Fall 2000, mechanical engineering students at Montana State University (USA) have been required to keep design journals of their senior design projects. The journals are being used now to investigate student design processes. of particular interest is the representations students use to reason about their design problems at different levels of abstraction. The faculty developed a scheme to code the journal data by three design levels (concept, system, and detail) and have applied it to six the team projects (21 individual journals). They then performed a frequency analysis of the different representational forms for design information found in the students' design journals. This paper describes the coding scheme and development, and reports some preliminary findings from the analysis.