Explicit Evaluation of Design Readiness for Student Refinement of Conceptual Design

Students at three graduate schools of mechanical engineering and adult groups in Japan have been taking conceptual design courses the authors teach. Among the three graduate schools, the 24 hour course, at the University of Tokyo, spread over 13 classes during 4 months, takes the students all the way from identifying their design goals, generating ideas, refining their designs, to building prototypes. The adult course students also spend long hours of building prototypes. Despite strong encouragement by the instructors for detail design, the students often leave their design concepts at rough stages without refining their ideas to the detail level needed for prototype building. Building a prototype from a design concept that is not fully expanded often results in efforts that lead to failure and retrial. Such back and forth between concepts and physical trial is unavoidable in design, however, if possible they better be kept at the minimum. The instructors, in their efforts to better motivate students to refine the designs, developed a metric “Level of Readiness (LOR) index” for evaluating how refined a design is. Students are better motivated to reach higher scores and this index that evaluate the quality of their designs, in terms of how detail they are, in numbers serves as a better incentive for the students than words from the instructors.