Prototyping in Engineering Design
A plethora of research demonstrates the importance of physical models in engineering design. Physical models include any kind of prototypes created by designers at any stage of their design cycle. They help designers visualize concepts, estimate implicit attributes of designs, validate assumptions, verify functionality of ideas, enhance communication between disparate design teams and selection of the best concept. While most of the users of prototypes encourage the use of prototypes at very stages of design, many researchers provide warnings about their use. This research is primarily motivated by the conflicting recommendations in literature about the use of physical prototypes in the engineering design process. It explores the various factors affecting the design thinking while prototyping and aims to develop better guidelines for the process.
Design Fixation & its Mitigation
Design fixation, when present, can lead to less novel ideas, adversely affecting the idea generation process as a whole. The primary aim of this study is to understand the factors affecting design fixation and thereby device methods to mitigate fixation to an extent.
Understanding User Preferences in New Product Development
Product design is a highly complex process that contains several steps starting from customer needs identification and ends with the successful market implementation of the final product. However, many times the needs of the end users of the products will be passive. i.e., many time users may not be able to tell the designer what they want. In a highly competitive market, it is not viable for the designers to take chances and design for the only needs that are specified by the user. They need to think about the associated passive or hidden needs for the users to accept their product. Many times, such needs can be derived from the reviews of a similar product in the market. Online marketing websites that are available to public such as amazon.com and ebay are great sources of such reviews. In this project, I intend to study the reviews on several commercially successful and unsuccessful products and see the hidden needs associated with each. This study will enable me to categorize the needs of users which can ultimately lead to a design method which can help designers in identifying the hidden needs for a product.
Development of TIED UP Course Delivery Framework
Twenty-first century engineering education in the US has benefited greatly from attention and fresh thinking in recent years, yet still faces significant challenges that hold back broader national success. Lack of student engagement in classrooms has been one of the serious concerns that cut across most of the engineering schools. Although it is often neglected, this results in serious attention problems among students, and may be one of the problems leading to poor retention rates in STEM disciplines. This is a part of a larger project (originally funded by the National Science Foundation - NSF) to handle one of the knottiest issues in undergraduate STEM education, namely the large fraction of students who simply will not succeed without significantly upgrading competencies they should already possess. Indeed, each student with STEM deficiencies has their own unique set of misunderstandings, misconceptions, and uneven skills. It is not a situation that lends itself to blanket re-teaching. This is a “hard work” project that entails a diligent reconnecting, concept by concept, of foundational STEM ideas as they are used and embedded in the engineering curriculum. That reconnecting is scaffolded by the multimedia and sound pedagogy, but it is carried out by the students themselves. The project blends critical and established findings in brain and learning science with multimedia, shared screen feedback, and other digital tools to significantly alter what can be called the attentional intensity of the course. In this project, students are expected to be more engaged both in and out of class time with course material, and instructors will be able to direct attention to the particulars of each student’s unique concept-building journey. This project shares, at the college level, important aspects of cognitively-guided instruction approach (CGI) as well as related theories of learning progressions at the elementary school level, in that it focuses on building coherence of student thinking at both a step-wise and large structure level by drawing the instructor into a more finely grained involvement in process. It represents an advance over CGI in its reliance on diverse technologies, and of course the target population differs.
For additional information, please contact me at [email protected]
A plethora of research demonstrates the importance of physical models in engineering design. Physical models include any kind of prototypes created by designers at any stage of their design cycle. They help designers visualize concepts, estimate implicit attributes of designs, validate assumptions, verify functionality of ideas, enhance communication between disparate design teams and selection of the best concept. While most of the users of prototypes encourage the use of prototypes at very stages of design, many researchers provide warnings about their use. This research is primarily motivated by the conflicting recommendations in literature about the use of physical prototypes in the engineering design process. It explores the various factors affecting the design thinking while prototyping and aims to develop better guidelines for the process.
Design Fixation & its Mitigation
Design fixation, when present, can lead to less novel ideas, adversely affecting the idea generation process as a whole. The primary aim of this study is to understand the factors affecting design fixation and thereby device methods to mitigate fixation to an extent.
Understanding User Preferences in New Product Development
Product design is a highly complex process that contains several steps starting from customer needs identification and ends with the successful market implementation of the final product. However, many times the needs of the end users of the products will be passive. i.e., many time users may not be able to tell the designer what they want. In a highly competitive market, it is not viable for the designers to take chances and design for the only needs that are specified by the user. They need to think about the associated passive or hidden needs for the users to accept their product. Many times, such needs can be derived from the reviews of a similar product in the market. Online marketing websites that are available to public such as amazon.com and ebay are great sources of such reviews. In this project, I intend to study the reviews on several commercially successful and unsuccessful products and see the hidden needs associated with each. This study will enable me to categorize the needs of users which can ultimately lead to a design method which can help designers in identifying the hidden needs for a product.
Development of TIED UP Course Delivery Framework
Twenty-first century engineering education in the US has benefited greatly from attention and fresh thinking in recent years, yet still faces significant challenges that hold back broader national success. Lack of student engagement in classrooms has been one of the serious concerns that cut across most of the engineering schools. Although it is often neglected, this results in serious attention problems among students, and may be one of the problems leading to poor retention rates in STEM disciplines. This is a part of a larger project (originally funded by the National Science Foundation - NSF) to handle one of the knottiest issues in undergraduate STEM education, namely the large fraction of students who simply will not succeed without significantly upgrading competencies they should already possess. Indeed, each student with STEM deficiencies has their own unique set of misunderstandings, misconceptions, and uneven skills. It is not a situation that lends itself to blanket re-teaching. This is a “hard work” project that entails a diligent reconnecting, concept by concept, of foundational STEM ideas as they are used and embedded in the engineering curriculum. That reconnecting is scaffolded by the multimedia and sound pedagogy, but it is carried out by the students themselves. The project blends critical and established findings in brain and learning science with multimedia, shared screen feedback, and other digital tools to significantly alter what can be called the attentional intensity of the course. In this project, students are expected to be more engaged both in and out of class time with course material, and instructors will be able to direct attention to the particulars of each student’s unique concept-building journey. This project shares, at the college level, important aspects of cognitively-guided instruction approach (CGI) as well as related theories of learning progressions at the elementary school level, in that it focuses on building coherence of student thinking at both a step-wise and large structure level by drawing the instructor into a more finely grained involvement in process. It represents an advance over CGI in its reliance on diverse technologies, and of course the target population differs.
For additional information, please contact me at [email protected]
© 2016 Viswanathan