2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In its fifth year, the Architectural Engineering Design Days challenge at the University of X has returned to a fully in-person format in 2022. The event has evolved after being online in 2020 and hybrid online/ in-person in 2021. For the first time this year, instructors have integrated a second phase of the design challenge into a studio course. The two-phased version of the challenge has provided an opportunity for the authors to study the student work developed before instruction, and the influence of design critiques and feedback on the results of the second phase.

The Design Days challenge for 2022 was for students in groups of 4 to design a piece of outdoor furniture for a given site on campus. Student teams were tasked with building a full-scale working mockup of their design using limited supplies. At the end of a 48-hour design sprint early in the term, student teams presented their mockups to panels of professors and industry guests to receive feedback.

One month later, the project was reintroduced to the same groups of students, but this time integrated into a design studio course. As part of the introduction to the second phase of the design challenge, the instructor presented a lecture on universal design. Students received two weeks of design development time, and two sessions of instructor and TA feedback to advance their design during the second phase. The final products of the second phase included updates to the original concepts in terms of design and construction, but also considerations of diversity in user experience.

In this paper, the authors review the improvements made to the Design Days Challenge as it returns to an all in-person event. Also included is an overview of the perceived advances in project results from phase 1 to phase 2 from the course instructors. Most importantly, the results of a student survey will share the students’ reflections on the modifications they made to their projects based on the receipt of feedback and course instruction during phase 2 of the Design Days challenge.