Design Education and Engineering Design

Abstract

Engineering design has been a focus of study not only due to its practical importance for the engineering and technology development domains, but also due to its rich setting that naturally supports cognitive and behavioral investigations of designing, learning, and teaming. It mostly involves ill-structured problem solving, which makes the act of designing and design education complex. This problem context often includes fundamental design, customization, personalization, and domain specific engineering issues. The multi-stage problem solving skills, for example, can be enhanced by integrating real-world problems to the design problem context – an aspect that also brings ill-structuredness. Given the importance of engineering design, scholars from both engineering design and science of problem solving domains, and indeed many others such as education, psychology, mechanical engineering, business, artificial intelligence, contributed to the state-of-the-art on this focus. To name a many approaches based on various education theories, project-based learning inquiry-based learning discovery constructivism and constructionism studied to increase our deep understanding of learners in design education domains. These approaches often consider individual and group design activities. Yet, there are aspects of designing that are still difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions and practice in classroom settings. This special includes five articles that broaden our understanding of how design education can be redesigned with instructional design principles and exemplify the role of education design to advance design education. The articles present recent research advances on learning technology and pedagogical experiments informed by theories of learning