How to adopt the practice of critiques to engineering design education?

Crits are widely used as part of the “creative discipline” as the main means of assessment. In engineering, the assessment tends to focus on technical feedback and lacks the discussion and reflection that are integral parts of the crit. We hypothesize that the crit can challenge the students to come up with better solutions.

There are no guidelines how to run a crit in any discipline and very few hints of it ever being used as part of engineering design. Luckily we have Yoon Soo, an expert of crits and the developer of 'Peer Crits' for our team! We ran pilot studies with over 40 students under different conditions ('use of crit' was one of the conditions), and found that it helped significantly improve the level on creativity in the designs they produced. This motivated us to give the crit a try in an actual class room setting.

The Crit was used in MNE 497 (Senior Capstone Mechanical Engineering class at UMass Dartmouth) to assess projects during the concepts embodiment phase. We used the Peer Crit format where teams were grouped together and asked to critique the projects in small groups (3 projects per group). Each team put up the original project objective, list of stakeholder needs, and current risks for everybody to see and then gave an overview of their chosen design. The students were tasked to discuss:

-The strengths of the design

-The weaknesses of the design

-Suggested improvements for the design

Each team took notes on the three topics. Each project was discussed for about 20 minutes.

After one hour, each team briefed the instructor (Katja) on the strengths, weaknesses and suggested improvements for their projects. Trina also observed some of the team interactions.

Here are the first observations from the use of the crit process:

+ universal participation by all students

+ teams took the crit and suggestions with an open mind (they were not defensive at all)

+ the feedback was more in depth than the usual technical feedback

- 2/12 teams felt they gained more from the instructor than from their peers

- the time it takes for the instructor to go over all the teams can be very long


If anybody would like to test the use of peer crits in their engineering classes, let us know we would be happy give step by step guidelines and other helpful tips on how to do it. Also, if somebody has already tried using crits in their classrooms, please share with us!

The business of innovation: Steven Johnson

Found an interesting article on BBC News about creativity and innovation. It speaks about how creativity and innovation happens through collaboration and working in groups.

Here is the link!

The business of innovation: Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson (youtube video link)

mind maps: creativity

What is creativity? How do people define creativity? Creativity means different things to different people, and when three professors of three different disciplines decided to put together mind maps based on their understanding of creativity we got the following results.

Trina Kershaw's mind map on creativity (Psychology):

Katja Hölttä-Otto’s mind map on creativity (Mechanical Engineering)

Yoon Soo Lee’s mind map on creativity (Graphic Design):

Innovation in Playground Design

I recently came across an article in TIME about designing better playgrounds.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2007398,00.html

David Rockwell designed playground equipment that consists of large foam blocks. Children can use them to build whatever they can imagine. In the article, children build cars, forts, etc.

We've been talking about how children's behavior contrasts with adults when it comes to imagination and design. Children have a lot of toys that encourage abstract representations, like Legos, dolls, blocks, and so forth. We wonder what happens between childhood and adulthood -- where does the creativity go? Children seem much less likely to fixate on the function of objects (seen in the real world, but also in research by German & Defeyter, 2000). Does fixation arise from additional knowledge, as suggested by the functional fixedness literature? Or is it the interaction with culture, expectations, etc.? Can innovation interventions help prevent fixation in design? We hope to find out through our research.

Off to a great start!

Our research is to a great start. The preliminary results were published at the annual ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) Conference this summer and the paper was awarded the best paper award.

Here’s the citation and abstract for it:

Genco, N. Holtta-Otto, K. and C.C. Seepersad, 2010, “An Experimental Investigation of the Innovation Capabilities of Engineering Students,” ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Louisville, KY.

One of the greatest challenges facing engineering education is the need to educate engineers who can innovate successfully. With increasing calls for enhancing the level of innovation in the national economy, the role of innovation in engineering education is often underemphasized and poorly understood. In this experimental study, we compare the results of concept generation exercises completed by freshman- and senior-level mechanical engineering students. Students were asked to use a modified 6-3-5/C-sketch method to generate concepts for a next-generation alarm clock. Senior-level students were divided into control and subject groups who implemented the standard 6-3-5/C-sketch method and a version of the method enhanced for creativity, respectively. Resulting concepts were analyzed using metrics for novelty, fixation, and quality. The results indicated that the freshman students produced more novel concepts and were less fixated on the sample clocks shown in the experiment. Both freshman and senior groups produced concepts with similar (high) levels of quality and feasibility. The results support the troubling conclusion that freshman engineering students are more innovative than seniors. This conclusion highlights the need for increased emphasis on innovation and creativity in the engineering curriculum.