Browsing by Subject "Capstone design"
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Item Effects of a structured prototyping strategy on capstone design projects(2015-05) Gurjar, Tanmay Pramod; Crawford, Richard H.; Jensen, Daniel DPrototyping is often a very important phase in a capstone engineering design project. However, in many cases, prototyping decisions are made arbitrarily by students, adversely affecting the quality of the final product delivered. Previous research efforts at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a structured prototyping strategy tool based on a synthesis of prototyping techniques that have been shown to be effective. This strategy tool leads designers through the process of making decisions about aspects of a prototype program, such as how many concepts to prototype, the number of prototype iterations to complete for a given concept, and whether to use scaled prototypes. In this study the effect of explicit discussion of these prototyping decisions on the results of the capstone design projects was evaluated. Research suggests that early and frequent prototyping leads to increases in the quality and the novelty of designs. Therefore, the goal of this project was to determine if exposure to the prototyping strategy tool leads to an increase in the number of prototypes constructed. At the beginning of the semester, students in the capstone course received instruction on the benefits of prototyping and on the use of the prototyping strategy tool. Interviews were conducted at the end of the semester to evaluate the students' prototyping efforts. These results were compared to previous capstone projects where the students did not receive formal guidance on making prototyping decisions. The results of the comparison show statistically significant increases in the proportion of teams opting to create prototypes and the average number of prototypes per team. This thesis describes the study in detail, analyzes the results, and presents conclusions and future directions for the research.Item Mapping of creativity in capstone design process(2008-05) Mendias, Johnny J.; Ekwaro-Osire, Stephen; Ertas, Atila; Rasty, JahanBringing a concept into reality is intriguing to any novice designers in academia. The development of a concept is created by novel thought, known as creativity. The application of creativity has been viewed as a substantial foundation to innovative design development. The motivation of this research is to enhance creativity in senior capstone design projects and discover a method to map creativity in capstone design process. To effectively enhance creativity, tools have to be developed to map it. Recently, the application of design notebooks have been used to determine the incubation of creativity through student participation in capstone design projects. As a result, design documentation is a good indicator of teamwork practices through group interaction and creative development. This research is proposed to determine the context of creativity through the creative elements, context of the individuals involved, inhibitions of creative progress, and the sustainable methods to foster creativity. This research included two student teams working on two different capstone design projects over the course of two semesters. The following team outcomes were used in this study namely, i) design notebooks, ii) project reports, iii) project presentations, and iv) the final artifact. To assess the creative context of the documentation, specific coding rubrics were applied to the design notebooks, proposals, and presentations to describe and quantify the creative instances that occurred in the course of the design process, and interpreted into the creative process. The influence and inhibitions of creativity were then reviewed upon completion of each respected capstone project and determine the creative thought and motivation to converge to innovative solutions. A team of professional designers analyzed the team reports and the final artifact through the use of questionnaires applied to the student research. As a result, the context to enhance creativity in capstone design is the capstone design team and is motivated extrinsically during the creative activities of divergence and incubation. The team applies the creative activities most effectively during the production phase of the capstone design process, which supported the need for a cohesive creative process to be implemented during capstone design activities.