Using Design Thinking and Technological Domains to Assess Knowledge Transfer in Engineering Design

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper examines the application of design thinking in engineering literacy courses and argues that, for engineering and technological literacy applications, design thinking exercises benefit from situating design activities within technological domains. This approach also facilitates assessment of the student design abilities. Design thinking is a well-known process for problem solving. However, when used in engineering literacy courses for non-engineering majors, the outcomes of the ideation stage are severely constrained by the student's internal technological knowledge base. Student design thinking exercises can result in technologically vague concepts. Liberal arts students from non-technical disciplines become frustrated and see the design process as suspect and fail to embrace a multidimensional perspective on design. Non-engineering students lack critical engineering science knowledge relevant to the problem but the nature of engineering literacy courses for non-engineers precludes in-depth mathematics-based engineering science prerequisites. We have found that the platform of technological domains effective in supporting students between the innovation of design thinking and the empowerment of engineering science. Technological systems form clusters or domains of related systems around a set of shared components based on similar underlying physical principles, for example, vapor-compression refrigeration systems. We have found that students benefit if design exercises are conducted in the context of a technological domain. In the work reported here, students studied the familiar domestic refrigerator as typifying the technology enabled by the engineering science underlying the vapor-compression cycle. Students were then presented with a design challenge involving a cooling application but different from the function of a domestic kitchen refrigerator. Non-engineering students were able to develop potentially feasible system design concepts at the component level that were novel to them. This approach made it possible to assess knowledge transfer and design ability of liberal arts students in a general education engineering literacy course.