Evaluating the Effect of Project Frame on Communicative Patterns in Capstone Design Pitches

Effective communication is an integral part of engineering design and leads to successful design outcomes. While there have been extensive calls to equip novice designers with effective communication skills, there is only a limited body of work that has attempted to characterize the communication patterns of novice designers, particularly when engaging with external audiences. This work seeks to characterize how the project type, or the nature of design problem, shapes the communicative patterns of novice designers when communicating design outcomes to external audiences. Presentations of design solutions from 46 teams were collected at the end of a semester-long capstone design program. These presentations were then characterized as industry- and human-centered projects. Analysis was conducted using topic modeling and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis to identify differences in linguistic patterns of novice designers between the two project types. Contrary to prior findings, no significant differences were found, implying that the communication patterns of novice designers are not affected by the type of project (or design problem being solved).