2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the post-industrial revolution era, after a prolonged period of ever-increasing emphasis on specialism in undergraduate engineering education, in recent decades there has been a shift towards promoting generalism and the development of trans-disciplinary problem-solving skills. Such reprioritizations of learning outcomes have been the most explicit and deliberate at liberal arts universities. A consequence of this reimagining has been the co-opting of the design process-based problem-solving framework, traditionally considered to be an engineering or architecture instrument, by other disciplines like management, arts, humanities and social sciences. The advent of frameworks like ‘human-centered design,’ or ‘design thinking’ has formalized the discipline-agnostic teaching and application of design, and has led to the creation of multiple sets of vocabularies and implementation schemes despite all having recursive iterative and adaptive features at their core, emphasizing similar values, and calling upon overlapping cognitive competencies.

This paper compares the engineering design process to popular design thinking methods in an effort to consolidate the two by highlighting similarities and differences between them. The comparison is based on a review of the literature and pedagogical experiences of faculty teaching both processes to engineering students at a liberal arts university. The traditional domains of application of the two approaches and modalities of various stages of the processes are analyzed to understand the spirit of each framework and then comment on their implementation attributes like the relative emphasis on quality vs efficiency, level of iteration, mindset cultivation, and innovation. Variations in these implementation attributes, and not underlying cognitive structures, are hypothesized to be the source of differences in the two frameworks. A mapping across the two is presented, and some recommendations about their teaching are shared. It is hoped that design educators can use learnings from the comparative study in course design and teaching to enable engineering students to: (i) understand general principles of design-based problem-solving and develop a designer’s mindset, (ii) link problem-solving techniques taught in engineering and non-engineering courses/contexts, and (iii) develop necessary skill and vocabulary sets to interact with non-engineers trained in various forms of the design framework