User requirements and engineering specifications represent important criteria that engineering designers use to define their design problem and evaluate the suitability of their solution concepts. User requirements describe qualitative needs or wants that users may have for potential solution concepts, while engineering specifications translate user requirements into quantified, measurable design parameters. The development of user requirements and engineering specifications may be informed by several different types of information, including data gathered from stakeholders, contextual research, academic literature, professional standards, expert advice, and benchmarking of existing products.

Novice designers are frequently tasked with developing user requirements and engineering specifications in curricular design contexts such as capstone courses. While several previous studies have explored novice designer processes related to requirements development, few studies have specifically described how novice designers make design decisions about their user requirements and engineering specifications in capstone settings. As a result, the specific ways that novice designers leverage information gathered from stakeholders, contextual research, and other sources when identifying and refining their user requirements and engineering specifications is unclear. Detailed information about novice decision-making processes is thus needed to develop effective support structures for novice designers engaged in developing user requirements and engineering specifications.

To address this research gap, this preliminary study explored how eight capstone teams justified the user requirements and engineering specifications that they developed in the design reports and final reports that they submitted as part of their capstone class. Our study was guided by the following research questions: 1) How do teams of novice designers justify the user requirements and engineering specifications that they develop for their design projects? 2) How often are specific justifications for user requirements and engineering specifications used across different novice design teams? and 3) How do novice design team justifications for user requirements and engineering specifications change over the course of their design projects? We collected design reports and final reports from all eight teams and analyzed these reports to identify how teams justified the user requirements and engineering specifications that they identified or iterated on at each stage of their capstone projects.

We identified seven main types of justifications that teams used when describing their user requirements and engineering specifications, including “User interactions,” “Perceptions of user needs,” “Sponsor interactions,” “Prior work,” “Technical research,” “Standards,” and “Constraints.” Some user requirements and engineering specifications were also included in design reports without clear justifications and were thus categorized as “Unclear.” Teams frequently used “Sponsor interactions” and “Perceptions of user needs” as justifications for user requirements but gathered limited data directly from users. As such, the user requirements developed by teams may have been based on inaccurate assumptions about user needs. Teams frequently used “Sponsor interactions,” “Technical research,” and “Prior work” as justifications for engineering specifications, with “Technical research” in particular being used by teams across multiple design reports. However, teams also developed several engineering specifications without clear justifications. Our findings suggest that novice designer approaches to developing user requirements are different from their approaches to developing engineering specifications. As such, novice designers may encounter different challenges depending upon whether they are developing user requirements or engineering specifications; our justification categories helped us characterize these various challenges and may be transferrable to other novice designer contexts as well. In addition, our findings suggest that as novice designers develop their design skills, they may need scaffolding and support tools that can help them develop user requirements and engineering specifications that accurately reflect user needs.

 


Novice Designers' Approaches to Justifying User Requirements and Engineering Specifications

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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