A report on Mudd Design Workshop II: "Designing design education for the 21st century"

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2001 by Dym, Clive L, Sheppard, Sheri D, Wesner, John W

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a workshop on design education held at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in May 1999. Mudd Design Workshop II was intended to provide a forum that would bring together design educators, design researchers, and designers from industry, in order to focus exclusively on the teaching of design in engineering education for the next century. Sessions were devoted to (1) design projects in both cornerstone and capstone courses, and metrics for selecting projects; (2) discipline-based and cross-disciplinary design courses; and (3) pedagogy, technology, and assessment in design education. Major emergent themes included the desirability of design throughout the curriculum, focuses on coaching and on learning, roles of projects and interactive learning, and the need to better address the interactions of grading and learning. Participants' specific commitments to future actions are also given.

I. THE ORIGIN OF THE MUDD DESIGN WORKSHOPS

The Center for Design Education (CDE) at Harvey Mudd College is an outgrowth of an engineering design center which had as its early focus the development of a network of computing and laboratory facilities that supported Harvey Mudd's design-- intensive, unspecialized, general engineering program. While the CDE still maintains an extensive Engineering Computation Facility (ECF), it has evolved into a center that has several additional foci, including:

a computing design environment to support students' from their freshman design course1,2 through their work in Engineering Clinic 3,4 in their junior and senior years;

computational tools to further improve students' ability to manage and schedule externally-sponsored freshman and Engineering Clinic design projects in the junior and senior years; and

an interest in stimulating increased awareness of design by engineering faculty nationally (and even internationally), in part by thinking about design as an integrator of the engineering education environment.

In support of the last focus the CDE organized and hosted the first Mudd Design Workshop in May 1997 entitled5 Computing Futures in Engineering Design. This workshop attracted more than forty design educators and researchers (representing, for example, Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, Florida State, Pittsburgh, Stanford, Washington) and designers (including engineers from Hewlett Packard, MacNeal-Schwendler, McDonnell Douglas) to address various issues in engineering design education. With financial support from both Mudd and Hughes Electronics, the workshop focused on the future roles of computing in doing design and engineering and in the teaching o(design and engineering. It was intended to provide useful insight, advice, and information to educators about how they might think about the future of design and design-related computing, and about the roles for organized centers (of design and related focuses) in engineering education. The meeting was organized as a workshop, with the sessions constructed to give all participants a chance to be heard as well as to hear and listen.

Workshop sessions were scheduled on: models of design; engineering use of computers in the "real world"; roles of technology in delivering education; and the question, what is learning? Three keynote talks were presented at the workshop. At the opening lunch, C. L. Dym presented a vision of design research and teaching within the HMC context. At the Workshop dinner, N. Mansur and C. Shulstad of Disney presented a visually-- intensive view of the roles played by computing in the design, construction, operation, and enjoyment of Disneyland. The final luncheon featured S. J. Fenves, then at Carnegie Mellon, as rapporteur who reported on all that had been heard and provided a cohesive summary of the principal threads of discussions

The response to this first Mudd Design Workshop was very positive, and so, supported by both Hughes Electronics and The GE Fund, the CDE organized and hosted a second Mudd Design Workshop in May 1999, this time under the rubric6 Designing Design Education for the 21st Century. This workshop brought together sixty design educators and researchers (including Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, George Mason, Massachsuetts-Lowell, MIT, Northwestern, Stanford, Technical University of Berlin, Tennessee, Tulane, Washington, Worcester Polytechnic, Yale) and design practitioners (including Lucent Technologies and Prescient Technologies) to focus on future directions for engineering design education. It is this second workshop6 that is briefly described in this paper by three members of its Advisory Committee.

II. STRUCTURE OF MDW II AND SESSION THEMES

Eight topical workshop sessions were scheduled over two and one-half days on the following topics: themes for design education; design projects as cornerstone; design projects as capstone; metrics for selecting design projects; discipline-based design education; integrated engineering design education; tools and technology in design education; assessment-how are we doing? A final wrap-up session tied everything together. Sessions were initiated with brief presentations by three or four panelists, after which open, moderated, general discussion followed. The panelists' position papers reflected ideas and attitudes about what was being done in engineering design education, as well as on what could be done in the future. Draft position papers were distributed to all participants in a preliminary Proceedings volume, and a final, formal volume of the proceedings was later published.6 In addition, many of the papers presented are contained in a special issue of the International Journal of Engineerng Education.6