Representations and Visual Synthesis in Engineering Design

Background Engineers who engage with innovation and design rely on cooperation and knowledge sharing across multiple disciplines. However, the traditional engineering curriculum promotes and emphasizes engineering sciences and monodisciplinary skills and gives less priority to important collaborative skills such as sketching and visualization. Purpose This article addresses how students engage with engineering design challenges and use visual representations to develop and integrate recognitions. Our study explores how technical, analytical disciplinary competences are combined with those of qualitative, ethnographic user studies. Design/Method Through a qualitative field study and an analysis of a collection of representations produced during a design process by a team of engineering students, the role of representations in the early stages of collaborative engineering design is explored. After reassembling the representations according to dates and themes, we deployed various perspectives from science and technology studies and engineering studies to assess the students' epistemic journey. Results Representations not only communicate findings but also incorporate analysis in their creation, and facilitate what we call collaborative design synthesis. Successful representations present and organize recognitions so that they are recognizable across other disciplines and can be integrated into new recognitions. Representations therefore shape the collaborative base of the design process and emphasize the important competences that can produce them. Conclusions The analysis shows that collaborative design synthesis is an epistemology consisting of (1) exploration, (2) inscription, (3) collection, and (4) combining and refining. The important ability of representations to draw together is termed transferability, and the competence to produce them, disciplinary mastery.