Learning to Design: Authenticity, Negotiation, and Innovation

Engineering design is a collaborative and complex process, and our understanding of how to support student teams in learning to design remains limited. By considering in-situ student design teams in a capstone biomedical engineering course, we are afforded the opportunity to contrast two versions of a non-sponsored project, then consider expert perceptions of their later sponsored designs. Data from two cohorts of the course yield compelling contrasts for authentic design learning experiences. We found that a non-sponsored redesign project led students to values customer needs and to use them to define the design problem, whereas in a kit-based version this did not occur. We also found that greater perceived opportunities to negotiate one's understanding within a team predicted more innovative team designs.