2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work In Progress: Investigating and Coding Design Signatures using Longitudinal Report Data in a Capstone Engineering Course

As students engage in a collaborative design project, it is important for them to reflect on their design process and progress as a team. Furthermore, understanding student teams’ progress on complex projects is critical for the teaching team. This understanding by the teaching team allows comprehensive feedback and support. Design signatures have been established as a form of team reflection that can visualize the team’s design process. Design signatures research has advocated for engineering programs to support students in visualizing and understanding their own design processes. In this work-in-progress paper, we describe efforts to develop design signatures using longitudinal report data in a capstone materials science & engineering course. We collaborated with the course teaching team to code student teams’ design progress reports and use the data to pilot the visualization of their design signatures, which depict engagement in the human-centered design (HCD) process. Our ongoing research has relied on HCD taxonomy that describes HCD as a set of five design spaces with unique processes that students implement as they work on a design project. In this paper, we use a multi-case study design to compare the design signatures of three teams. We present and use a coding scheme to generate the signatures, provide visuals of these signatures, and discuss their implications. These efforts are significant for developing tools that help teams reflect on their own process and engage more effectively in design. In ongoing work, we are adapting our coding scheme to automate the process of producing design signatures, which could benefit instructors and groups by providing real-time data that could inform prompt, comprehensive feedback during design projects.

Authors

Ms. Taylor Parks http://orcid.org/0009-0005-3311-7795 University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Taylor Parks is the engineering course development fellow with the Siebel Center for Design’s Assessment and Research Team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She earned her bachelor's in engineering mechanics and master's in curriculum & instruction from Illinois. Her research focuses primarily on supporting students’ design competency development through the implementation of strategic course design content and by promoting teamwork in complex engineering problem solving through collaborative task design. She currently co-leads the integration of human-centered engineering design within select departments across the Grainger College of Engineering.
Dr. Saadeddine Shehab University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

I am currently the Associate Director of Assessment and Research team at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work with a group of wonderful and talented people at SCD’s Assessment and Research Laboratory to conduct research that informs and evaluates our practice of teaching and learning human-centered design in formal and informal learning environments.

My Research focuses on studying students’ collaborative problem solving processes and the role of the teacher in facilitating these processes in STEM classrooms.
Dr. Matthew D Goodman University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr. Goodman received degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from Iowa State University (B.S. & M.S.) and the University of Illinois (Ph.D.). Currently, he is a senior lecturer in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at University of Illinois and a Siebel Center for Design Affiliate. There, he teaches introductory materials science courses to non-majors as well as the major-specific capstone sequence, utilizing and emphasizing the Human-Centered Design framework.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026