A Comparative Analysis of Student Perceptions of Recommendations for Engagement in Design Processes

Engineering designers are tasked with increasingly complex problems necessitating the use and development of various supports for navigating complexity. Prescriptive design process models are one such tool. However, little research has explored how engineering designers perceive these models' recommendations for engagement in design work. In this initial exploratory study, we analyzed data from 18 individual semi-structured interviews with mechanical engineering students to identify participant perceptions. As many design process model visualizations lack explicit attention to some social and contextual dimensions, we sought to compare perceptions among two drawn from engineering texts and one that was developed with the intent to emphasize social dimensions. We identified five salient areas of participant perceptions of the design process models. Perceptions of the process models related to what designers should do (starting and moving through a design process, gathering information, prototyping, and evaluating or testing) and what they should consider (aspects of focus). Our collection of participant perceptions across the three process models suggests different design process models make perceptions of certain recommendations more salient than others. However, participant perceptions also varied for the same process model. We suggest several implications for design education and training based on participant perceptions of these three process models, particularly the importance of leveraging multiple design process models. The comprehensive descriptions of participant perceptions across five areas of design work provided through our initial study provide a foundation for further investigations bridging designers' perceptions to intent to behavior and, ultimately, design outcomes.