SUMMARY

The engineering design process is often characterized as a step-by-step process that guides the development of new products from initial problem identification, through prototyping stages, and towards a final realized solution. This research first focuses on measuring functional decomposition as a design strategy by refining a functional modeling scoring rubric that can be used as an instructional tool or a general evaluation metric of function decomposition quality. This led to a curiosity about how functional modeling instruction affects students' ability to understand and represent engineering systems. A mental model elicitation instrument was developed to investigate the effects of functional decomposition on systems understanding. A study involving graduate engineering students showed that instruction on functional modeling increased the completeness of students’ mental model representations of common engineering systems attributed to a stronger framework for system communication. A follow-up study compared engineering and non-engineering undergraduates' mental models of these systems and yielded similar improvements in mental model representation. This follow-up study also revealed that technological literacy can be increased for non-engineering majors through instruction on functional modeling and product teardown activities. Next, this research investigates how different strategies during the prototyping process affects design success. Results show that a parallel prototyping strategy (as opposed to the more traditional iterative strategy) yields better design success, improved engineering design self-efficacy, and broader exploration of the solution space. Yet, students show a strong preference for an iterative prototyping strategy despite the benefits of using a parallel prototyping strategy. While the work on functional decomposition and mental models describes effective strategies for design representation and systems thinking communication, the latter prototyping study explores design strategies in a context with tangible application. Taken as a whole, this work showcases different design strategies that improve the engineering design process and facilitate the development of innovative engineering solutions. https://gatech.webex.com/gatech/j.php?MTID=m312406c494c942309e8ccf4336c66be6