2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Design Tool Subway Map for Undergraduate Design Projects

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) - Tools for Planning and Evaluation of Design Projects

Engineering curricula featuring senior design experiences may be the first time students have an opportunity to experience a team-based, open-ended authentic design. The curriculum at a small, urban, private school is centered around a series of hands-on, client-based design courses in each of the four years of the plan of study called the DesignSpine®. Projects are completed over the course of a full academic year. Clients for these student projects are mainly external industry partners, with some internal faculty or departmental clients and a small number of competitions. Faculty serve in multiple roles, including technical consultants and project team coaches throughout the program.

While historically successful, semester evaluations and team status reports often referenced uncertainty among student teams for next steps or appropriate tools to progress the design process. A faculty committee tasked with the responsibility to review, develop, and implement design course work was inspired by the Agile subway map to provide students with a comprehensive representation of the school’s design process, and alleviate uncertainty. The faculty converted curriculum topics into a subway map representation of the project management, product development, and design tools covered in the course curriculum. All tools and resources have been mapped to the core concepts of the school’s design process: Ask, Plan, Imagine, Research, Create, Test & Evaluate, and Communication. The subway map is intended to guide student teams through any problems during the design process that correlate to a particular core concept. In addition to the map, faculty have compiled summary resources for the tools and topics along the core concepts.

This paper will present the DesignSpine® subway map for design, and the development process of the map and its accompanying resources. This resource should be of interest to programs with product/process design and capstone experiences.

Authors

Dr. Megan Hammond University of Indianapolis [biography]

Megan Hammond received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Western Michigan University. She is an assistant professor in the R.B. Annis School of Engineering at the University of Indianapolis. Her research interests include cluster analysis, anomaly detection, human centered design, and engineering education.
Dr. Kenneth Reid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2337-7495 University of Indianapolis [biography]

Kenneth Reid is the Associate Dean and Director of Engineering at the R. B. Annis School of Engineering at the University of Indianapolis. He and his coauthors were awarded the Wickenden award (Journal of Engineering Education, 2014) and Best Paper award, Educational Research and Methods Division (ASEE, 2014). He was awarded an IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award (2013) for designing the B.S. degree in Engineering Education. He is a co-PI on the “Engineering for Us All” (e4usa) project to develop a high school engineering course “for all”. He is active in engineering within K-12, (Technology Student Association Board of Directors) and has written multiple texts in Engineering, Mathematics and Digital Electronics. He earned a PhD in Engineering Education from Purdue University, is a Senior Member of IEEE, on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Education Society, and a Member of Tau Beta Pi.
Dr. Joseph B. Herzog http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2441-6169 University of Indianapolis [biography]

Joseph B. Herzog is an Associate professor in the R.B. Annis School of Engineering at the University of Indianapolis. He chose to come to the University of Indianapolis because he is passionate about teaching, is excited about the direction of the new R.B. Annis School of Engineering, is glad to return to his engineering roots, and is happy to be close to his extended family. Previously he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Arkansas. He is truly grateful for his time at the University of Arkansas, and enjoyed his department, students, and the campus. While in Fayetteville, he also served as a faculty in the Microelectronics-Photonics Program and the Institute for Nanoscience and Engineering. He received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame working in the Nano-Optics Research Lab with J. Merz and A. Mintairov. After this he was a Welch Postdoctoral Research Associate, researching plasmonic nanostructures at Rice University with Douglas Natelson in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. In the summer of 2017 he was a Fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC working with Jake Fontana on tunable subnanometer gap plasmonic metasurfaces as part of the Office of Naval Research Summer Faculty Research Program. At the NRL he worked in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, which is a division of the Materials Directorate at the NRL. His experience also includes working for Intel Corporation both in Hillsboro, OR and Santa Clara, CA; and he worked at the Berliner Elektronenspeicherring-Gesellschaft für Synchrotronstrahlung m.b.H. (BESSY - Berlin electron storage ring company for synchrotron radiation) in Berlin, Germany, researching ultra thick high-aspect-ratio microfabrication. His research focuses on experimental nano-optics, including plasmonics, nanofabrication, computational modeling, photonic crystals, and engineering education.

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