2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Decision-making that occurs during the senior design project process may require both standard as well as more creative pedagogical strategies. The goal of this project was to characterize student decision-making processes that occur when skill-based design strategies and procedures prove inadequate. In addition to considering students’ knowledge, the project examined how students applied emotion and intuition strategies to deal with design problems, depending on the complexity of the industrial projects.
The analysis focused on projects offered by three different industrial partners: Advanced Mechanical Technology, Inc. (AMTI), located in Watertown, MA; Rowheels, located in Merritt Island, FL; and Hologic Inc., located in Danbury, CT.
The AMTI company requested that students design a device and protocol to quantify the effect of possible errors during human balance recordings. Generally, the data output from force plates has errors related to crosstalk, hysteresis, noise, nonlinearity, and questionable manufacturer claims. The errors and their effect on the usefulness of the data need to be determined. By applying the same protocol across three different AMTI force platforms, students could identify errors originating from crosstalk, noise, nonlinearity, and questionable manufacturer claims.
Rowheels requested a study to validate the effectiveness of a novel reverse propulsion wheelchair system designed to reduce wheelchair induced shoulder injuries. The company asked students to conduct a small pilot study to compare muscle activation, acceleration, and mobility of conventional and reverse propulsion wheelchairs.
Hologic Inc. requested a non-invasive study to compare the physiological stress induced upon mammography patients during compression with the SmartCurve Breast Stabilization system versus the Standard of Care (a flat paddle).
This paper proposes a complementary approach to the traditional design pedagogy by combining the ecological concept of affordances with the neural concepts of emotion and intuition. The classical cognitive design engineering framework is extended through the neuro-ecological approach which includes personal student attributes that are important in the design environment. The proposed affordance-, emotion-, and intuition-based models correspond to the three types of student comprehension, namely: knowing, adapting and creating, respectively. The new framework is not a predictive model of student learning, rather, it describes the neuro-ecological learning processes of students and their design environment.