2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Visual thinking plays a foundational role in imagination, problem-solving, and design—yet it remains underemphasized in engineering education. Although the visual system supports perception, cognition, and memory, the decline of formal visual thinking instruction in secondary and postsecondary curricula limits students’ ability to meet the full cognitive demands of engineering, especially in design contexts. This paper argues for the critical integration of visual thinking pedagogy into engineering education, grounded in both deterministic and integrative perspectives on visual perception. Drawing on four years of implementation in secondary engineering courses and multiple offerings in postsecondary design programs, the study outlines a structured pedagogy that incorporates manual, analog methods—such as blank-page notebooks, sketching, reflective writing, annotation, and marginalia—alongside transdisciplinary strategies that connect visual thinking with neuroscience, psychology, communication, ethics, and data interpretation. Through qualitative analysis of student work, classroom activities, and reflective practices, the paper demonstrates how visual thinking enhances cognitive flexibility, critical and causal reasoning, and creative capacity. In an era of increasingly visual and algorithmically mediated communication, this research underscores the ethical imperative of equipping students not only to interpret and generate visual information, but also to critically engage with the perceptual, cognitive, and technological systems that shape it. The findings support the broader integration of visual thinking into transdisciplinary curricula and offer a framework for cultivating more reflective, perceptive, and ethically engaged engineers.