Investigating How Design Concepts Evolve in Engineering Students

A critical aspect to engineering practice is the ability to design solutions to ill-structured problems. Prior research has shown that such solutions are highly effective when they are evaluated in relation to multiple design concepts. However, prior research has also shown that engineering students tend to fixate on their initial design ideas rather than base their solutions on the integration of many diverse concepts. One recently developed method to overcome the problems of fixation is 77 Design Heuristics. This method for generating design concepts comes in the form of 77 cards, each with a different cognitive prompt for generating a solution (e.g., reduce material, flatten). By using the cards, engineers and engineering students are able to expand their horizons of possible solutions to challenging design problems. Using a first-year engineering course, we integrated the 77 Design Heuristics cards to document how these students develop final concepts in relation to their initial ideas. We analyzed 12 firstyear engineering students, distributed across 3 different design teams. Our findings demonstrate key influences that did foster idea fluency (Theme 1: Influence of 77 Cards on Early Design Concepts) but also ways that students remained attached to particular concepts throughout their design process (Theme 2: Resilient Concepts after Concept Generation).