Measuring design innovation for project-based design assessment: considerations of robustness and efficiency

Christian Schunn,Joel Chan,Andrea Goncher

doi:10.15446/bitacora.v27n4esp.68959

Abstract

Los enfoques instructivos para la adquisición de habilidades en procesos de diseño innovativo para ingenieros y diseñadores son fundamentales para desarrollar competencias de diseño. Se necesitan recursos que permitan una evaluación eficiente y válida de los resultados del diseño, sin embargo, los métodos de evaluación actuales no son adecuados para los proyectos heterogéneos de las clases de diseño basadas en proyectos auténticos como diseño final. Por ello, nosotros desarrollamos una medida robusta y eficiente, y la validamos con un conjunto grande y diverso de resultados de diseño de una clase de diseño basada en proyectos. La medida se basa en juicios expertos sobre el valor y la funcionalidad de los conceptos de diseño derivados de una serie de requisitos de diseño ponderados por su importancia.Las nuevas medidas de evaluación de los resultados en el contexto de entornos de diseño auténticos basados en proyectos, como el desarrollado en el presente estudio, deben interactuar con las métricas basadas en procesos para crear una entrada de mayor calidad en la evaluación general de rendimiento del equipo de diseño.

Highlights

A key concern of design education research is to discover ways to support the training of future innovators in design who have the tools and skills to produce novel artifacts that add significant value to stakeholders (Bransford, 2007; Dym, et al, 2005)
To address the need for function-focused assessment of design outcomes, we look to the literature on design innovation research for measures that might apply in an assessment context
Because the focus of this paper is on approaches for measuring innovation output rather than process characteristics, we focus on Shah and colleagues’ novelty and quality metrics

Summary

Introduction

A key concern of design education research is to discover ways to support the training of future innovators in design (i.e., engineering or industrial designers) who have the tools and skills to produce novel artifacts that add significant value to stakeholders (Bransford, 2007; Dym, et al, 2005). Authentic learning contexts often take the form of a project-based class, such as capstone design In such a class, students (individually or in teams) tackle a design problem, moving through major early phases of professional design, from problem formulation and understanding, to requirements definition, to concept generation and selection, to prototyping (stopping short of fabrication). Authentic design problems are ill-structured and admit multiple solutions These properties invalidate key assumptions of traditional methods of assessment (e.g., existence of one “gold standard” answer) and render them unusable. Little guidance exists in the literature as to how to design and implement design outcome measures that are objective, reliable, and robust across multiple contexts We argue that this lack of guidance is a major reason that educators tend to either neglect assessment of design outcomes, or implement them in an ad-hoc manner (McKenzie, et al, 2004; Pembridge and Paretti, 2010; Sobek and Jain, 2004)

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Results

Conclusion