Conference Agenda

The development of modern communication and online collaborative tools has helped to increase the diversity and distribution of product design teams. Where designers may once have shared a physical space, remote working and asynchronous design practices are rapidly becoming prevalent. As the world continues to adapt to significant events in the post Covid-19 era, there is much debate about whether or not such working practices may become the norm and their value. At the same time, the emergence of digitally-driven design tools and generative AI offers design teams a diverse range of approaches for rapid realisation during design development, with substantial debate regarding the legitimacy of work conducted using such tools. Where physical model making was once the cornerstone of product design, modern techniques in computer aided design, generative design, rapid prototyping, and immersive tools offer new opportunities to accelerate and enhance the design process and, at least in theory, lead to superior design solutions. This is further supported by the use of generative AI tools which can support the many other facets of working in a globally distributed design team; tools for language translation, generation of code for mechatronic designs, automated scripting and graphic design, to name a few.

This study considers and reflects upon the experiences of globally distributed groups of design students, set a particular design challenge and given free choice over the tools that they may employ to complete that challenge. The study presents a set of reflective case studies undertaken by students working in asynchronous globally-distributed teams. The students were tasked with a product design challenge and organised into teams across universities from New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, India and Japan. The teams conducted the design challenges over eight weeks, culminating in completed design solutions. Teams were asked to reflect upon how the range of methods available to them might best be deployed, presented, and utilised and what the key differences and benefits from particular approaches might be. Interestingly many “traditional” tools were still employed alongside more contemporary options. The study reflects upon their experiences and how their choices shaped their solutions and learning throughout the design process.

Ideation techniques such as associative-thinking methods are commonly used to explore design proposals. However, limited experiences and knowledge in young designers can constrain diverse and meaningful design solutions. Emerging artificial-intelligence technologies, like ChatGPT, provide easy access to a global knowledge base which could inform associative-thinking outcomes. ChatGPT excels at generating lists of user-specified topics to accelerate learning with access to decades of gathered online experiences and insights. This study hypothesised that using ChatGPT to inform associative-thinking techniques would improve student idea generation compared to analogue methods in a new product development workshop. Product ideas were represented on Post-it notes, and outcomes were measured by fluency, flexibility, and originality. Thirty-five undergraduate students (first-year freshmen to fourth-year seniors) from Brigham Young University participated in two innovation workshops. One utilised ChatGPT in team ideation efforts, and the other used analogue methods. Over 75 percent of students had engineering related majors of study while less than 25 percent were non-engineering disciplines. All students were equally taught associative thinking techniques, and the ChatGPT group had additional training on software usage. Results show that fluency and flexibility outcomes were slightly lower in the ChatGPT group. In originality, the analogue group averaged twice the ideas of the ChatGPT group. Self-reported performance of flexibility and originality were lower in the ChatGPT group, but higher for fluency. Ideation effectiveness, enjoyment, and empowerment were all lower in the ChatGPT group. Observations revealed that ChatGPT-assisted teams had increased team interactions. Future research might benefit from longer ideation sessions and visualisation training.

Teamwork is an extremely effective pedagogical tool in engineering education. New Product Development (NPD) has been an effective strategy of companies to streamline and bring innovative products and solutions to customers. Thus, Engineering curriculum in many schools, some collaboratively with business schools, have brought NPD into the curriculum at graduate level. Teamwork is invariably used during instruction where students work in teams to come up with new products and solutions. They need to be creative as a group and generate a breadth of ideas and innovative solutions. They also need to be very efficient in their teamwork and work cohesively. The two distinctive traits of the teams, ideational creativity and effective teamworking introduce different creative tensions in the team members – ideational conflicts and tensions thereof, and relational conflicts and interpersonal tensions thereof. Teams that foster and effectively manage these creative tensions are successful and teams that are not, show poor team performance. In this paper we explore the network structural analysis of these tensions and propose a Creative Tension Balance (CTB) index along the lines of Degree of Balance in social networks that has the potential to highlight the successful (and unsuccessful) NPD teams. Team communication reflects the team dynamics among team members and hence the team’s emails are analyzed to generate the social networks for analysis. CTB index is computed and this is used to correlate to the overall NPD team performance. It is found to capture the signatures of high and low performing teams.

A novel “employment experience” module is presented that utilises a students’ existing employment arrangements to further develop the key skills of communication, self-management and organisation. There is no requirement for the job to be in an engineering company, or to involve technical engineering tasks. The students report on their achievement of learning outcomes relating to ethical considerations such as health and safety, codes of practice, quality assurance and environmental considerations with evidence of their self-directed work within teams.

The Employment Experience module aims to improve students’ learning experience in mechanical engineering by enhancing skills required by accrediting bodies, such as Engineers Ireland, through work-based experience. The process aims to develop key competences of an engineering technician: effective communication and interpersonal skills, self-management, professional responsibility, and creating and applying safe working practices [1]. Education in engineering must focus on behaviors and interactions between people rather than technical skills alone [2]. Successful students are awarded a module exemption in professional development in the next academic year.

Employment is sourced by the student independently and a defined period of work experience is completed within an organisation. The employer’s permission is sought by the student to partake in the review the company’s organisational structures. Confidentiality is agreed where necessary. Presentations of the learning outcomes, case studies of previous students’ reports, and support from the careers team in terms of CV writing, employer and alumni connections are provided. The students partake in mentoring meetings during stage 2, the final assessment is an oral presentation on the employment experience and a written structured report giving evidence of the achievement of each learning outcome. Feedback from the employer is also collected.

This paper presents a review of the novel assessment procedure for an employment experience process that has been implemented for four years. The literature reviews other established work placement and pedagogical approaches and highlights this approach’s novel elements. A reflection of the success of the approach to enhance management, team working and communication skills for engineering students is presented in terms of:

i) quality of the alignment of student’s evidence of their individual employment experience with the module learning outcomes,

ii) an evaluation of the pass /fail assessment procedure and assessment panel comments and conclusions,

iii) how the learning outcomes met by participating students compares to the traditional professional development module that students can be exempt from if successful,

iv) participation statistics of students and companies, not limited to the areas of the engineering, business, financial, service, and agricultural sectors,

v) the importance of the 3-way equal partnership and responsibilities between the student, lecturer and the employer.

[1] Una Beagon, Brian Bowe, “Understanding professional skills in engineering education: A phenomenographic study of faculty conceptions,” The Research Journal For Engineering Education, vol. 112, no. 4, pp. 1109-1144, 2023.

[2] Engineers Ireland, “Engineering Technician - Regulations for the Title of Engineering Technician,” Engineers Ireland, Dublin, 2005.

Collaboration is essential to Design and it is a learned skill that needs to be integrated deep into education processes. Therefore, teamwork could enable students to look beyond their own space, time and culture and prepare them for collaborative work in their future design practice. In this study, a blended approach of online tools was tested in design education process has demonstrated improved engagement of students in collaboration. The online tools discussed in this study include Slack, Figma, Miro and a card-based online workshop tool designed by the team.

The study followed a course in design college from 2019 to 2022, to discuss how online tools affect the design education process in studio course of graduate students.

The main objective is to evaluate how the online tools impacted students’ learning and collaboration performance. Firstly, we focused on the co-creation and the competences developed in the collaboration process. Then, we examine the quality of the design project and correlate it to the effectiveness of the communication in the teams. Finally, data were collected with surveys and self-reflection writings carried out at the end of each semester, and comparative study on the intercultural collaborative project outcomes with the outcomes of a traditional in-house team project.

The results revealed that the blended approach has generated promising statistics about the learning and collaborating inclination and teamwork engagement. The advantages and values created are summarized in conclusion.