Physical Modeling in Design Projects: Development and Testing of a New Design Method

Physical models are widely used as idea generation tools by industrial designers, engineers, engineering educators and government agencies. Many schools promote the use of physical models in their engineering curricula. Despite the apparent popularity of physical models, little is known about their cognitive impacts and when they should be implemented in the design process. A few studies have explored physical models and their use as idea generation tools; however the guidelines from them are conflicting. Based upon these conflicting guidelines, a series of controlled and qualitative studies are conducted by the authors to understand the cognitive impacts of physical models in engineering idea generation. In addition to the insights from these studies, data are collected from a project-based graduate design course. The reports from design teams prototyping their ideas as a part of a class project are studied. These reports provide insights about the conceptual errors that student designers make as they build and test physical models of their designs. To reduce the two most critical errors, a design method (Model Error Reduction Method) is formulated. This design method forces the designers to think about two potential conceptual errors in their designs and provides guidance to rectify the issues. The two conceptual errors that the method addresses are: failure to account for critical loads and failure to design connections. This paper presents a controlled experiment evaluating the effectiveness of the method. The preliminary results show that novice designers find the design method extremely useful; moreover, the method seems to help eliminate, to a large extent, said conceptual errors. These findings suggest that the method might augment existing engineering design curricula.