Identifying Multidisciplinary Metrics to Analyze NASA Case Studies

Abstract

Background: Communication is fundamental to the success of engineered systems, enabling interactions between the system's stakeholders. Systems engineering, an integrative discipline on which the contributions of many disciplines are evaluated against each other, may particularly benefit from research in communication methods. Specifically, storytelling may be beneficial to engineers because it enables sense-making. Research into storytelling is conducted to identify storytelling metrics that could be useful in engineering communication, specifically engineering case studies. Literature review: Although storytelling has been identified in past research as possibly useful to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and software requirement writing, a rigorous study of the use of storytelling elements in systems engineering communication has not been performed. Research question: How are storytelling elements currently being applied in engineering case studies? Research methodology: Twelve interdisciplinary metrics from storytelling, content analysis, and engineering are identified from the literature and used to characterize a collection of 48 NASA case studies. The values of the metrics for each case study are determined and analyzed using statistical and content analyses. Results and discussion: Analysis of the 12 metrics indicates that the case study design region with a historical backstory structure, climactic plot structure, and early points of attack is most frequently used by designers. Conclusions: The analysis indicates that certain storytelling elements applied in engineering case studies are used more frequently. Further work is needed to leverage the metrics as design variables in engineering case study writing.