Resumen de Decision making in engineering capstone design: participants’ reactions to a workshop about diverse types of reasoning
Emily Dringenberg, Annie Abell, Giselle Guanes
Engineers are expected to make decisions in the context of design, which is ill-structured. Capstone courses serve as an opportunityfor engineering students to engage in design and practice making decisions that do not have a single correct answer. Empiricalresearch has demonstrated that when making such decisions, people use informal reasoning, of which there are multiple types:rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic. Despite this reality, engineering education often portrays decision making in the context ofengineering design as objective. For example, capstone design instruction typically focuses on providing students with tools tofacilitate rational reasoning alone. In this paper, we introduce a framework for informal reasoning that can be used to thinkcritically about how we teach decision making in the context of engineering capstone design. In addition, we use this paper tobriefly describe the ways in which capstone design conference attendees engaged with this framework when it was presented in aworkshop during the 2018 Capstone Design Conference. To conclude, we present preliminary recommendations for capstone designeducators to integrate more opportunities for diverse and realistic forms of reasoning in their teaching practices.
