Exploring `Designer Context' in Engineering Design: The Relationship Between Self, Environment, and Design Methods

Abstract

Engineering design methods support engineers’ decision-making throughout a design process in order to improve design outcomes. The selection and implementation of suitable design methods are therefore critical to project success. Prior engineering design research has focused on designers' professional experiences or the problem context for guiding method choices. Perhaps due to disciplinary norms of objectivity, individual characteristics outside of an engineer's professional expertise are not seen as influential on design outcomes. In contrast, theories from other design disciplines define aspects of a designer's experience outside of their professional self as central to design practice.

This dissertation seeks to reconcile these two paradigms by exploring whether `designer context' factors, that are often not discussed in engineering design but are found in other design fields (i.e. - organizational culture, gender, race) can impact design outcomes via method selection and implementation. Results from practitioner interviews on designer context and prototyping methods, as well as an empirical study of a novel design method, suggest that a broad range of designer context factors can influence design method selection and implementation, ultimately impacting the efficiency and efficacy of a design process. Therefore, if engineering designers were to consider their holistic designer context and its influence on their work, as occurs in other design fields, better engineering outcomes could be achieved.

An exploratory study consisting of qualitative interviews formalized designer context and illustrated how these contextual factors impacted methods used by practitioners in the medical device industry. This study provides an initial foundation of designer context factors for exploration in future research and practice. These factors were categorized into the Design Environment, or the external factors surrounding a designer when they are designing, and the Designer's Self, or the internal factors related to a designer.

Interviews with design practitioners from small-to-medium sized enterprises in Rwanda and Kenya revealed specific resource constraints impacting the implementation of prototyping methods. Many of the identified constraints were related to the practitioners’ context. Limited access to quality materials or fabricators, often due to difficulties navigating a decentralized market, added time and cost to the process. Practitioners reported trying to develop simple, functional, and physical prototypes with increasing fidelity through a highly iterative process. However, these constraints negatively impacted the chosen prototyping method, suggesting that alternative methods could be beneficial.

In an empirical study, our team proposed and implemented a new method for considering multiple stakeholder preferences, the Stakeholder Agreement Metric (SAM) framework, to support the design of a hand tool to reduce injuries for informal electronic-waste (e-waste) recyclers in rural Thailand. This method was compared to the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), an existing method that supports similar decisions. Results showed that the SAM framework outperformed AHP in this informal setting due to the failed completion of AHP by participants. The study highlights how designer context not only influenced the implementation of design methods but also their development.

This dissertation expands the boundaries of what factors should be considered influential on design processes and their outcomes. Across all three studies, designer context was shown to influence method selection and implementation. The findings suggest that contextual factors affect design methods in practice and should be included in future research to enable the selection and implementation of more suitable and effective design methods.