2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Capstone experiences in Architectural Engineering (AE) programs most commonly meet ABET-defined culminating design experiences that typically require a substantial written report and one or more presentations be generated and delivered by students. In fact, some capstone reports commonly exceed 100 pages, and students often prioritize the technical work over succinct summaries. Some capstones further have embedded writing requirements that satisfy general education requirements. Prior work similarly notes that students struggle to write concisely and lack skills to leverage images, charts, and figures to convey results quickly and clearly. In addition, many AE programs rely on multidisciplinary team-based capstones with multiple iterations of design that are not always effectively compared and contrasted in final deliverables. While page limits do exist in capstone-type student competitions, like the Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI) student design competition, which drives conciseness; those formats do not consistently align with documentation practices used by the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.
In a newly revamped AE capstone course, the authors piloted the Lean Construction Institute’s (LCI) practice of Lean Thinking by implementing the A3 Problem Solving approach. Here, student teams are required to summarize key technical decisions, studies, and alternative designs on concise A3 (11x17) sheets (ideally one sheet per topic), emphasizing visual information and only the most important results. Appendices were allowed for technical justifications, assumptions, and sample work, but students were explicitly told not to format the documents into traditional written reports. Results indicate A3 writing adoption showed positive impacts on writing quality and technical summarization, alongside initial barriers related to learning the A3 format and identifying essential result-based information. This paper describes the adopted A3 approach, shares takeaways from student work, and provides recommendations for integrating this writing technique into future design courses and capstones.