Surfacing Students Design Problem Understanding through System Mapping: A Novice-Expert Comparison

An engineer or engineering team's conception of the nature of a design problem for a given project will have a marked effect on what criteria and constraints are identified, what ideas are explored, what models or prototypes are tested, and ultimately what artifact emerges from their process. For engineering design instructors, deeply capturing students' conceptions of their design problem could prove to be a useful reflection tool for design projects, particularly capstone design. While student generated problem statements and enumeration of criteria and constraints begin to reveal students' design problem conceptions, these formats may not allow the full details of students' understanding of the problem to emerge. In this work we propose to adapt an approach used in policy evaluation, called Participatory Systems Mapping, as a tool for engineering students to externalize their design problem understanding. Participatory System Mapping is similar to concept mapping, but focuses explicitly on mapping systems, the core factors that shape the system or systems, and nature of the relationships between components or factors in the system. Design problems are not decontextualized descriptions or abstractions; they exist in real-world open systems, where social, economic, technical, physical, and other factors are tightly interwoven. Thus, this approach holds potential to reveal a greater depth of students' understanding of real-world design problems. We explore the utility of this approach through an expert and novice comparison study, which reveals differences in their maps. Discussion and implications address using system mapping as an instructional or reflective tool for senior and other design experiences.