A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF PROTOTYPE USE FOUND IN STUDENTS’ DESIGN PROJECTS

DS 95: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2019), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. 12th -13th September 2019

Year: 2019
Editor: Bohemia, Erik; Kovacevic, Ahmed; Buck, Lyndon; Brisco, Ross; Evans, Dorothy; Grierson, Hilary; Ion, William; Whitfield, Robert Ian
Author: Petrakis, Konstantinos; Wodehouse, Andrew; Hird, Abigail
Series: E&PDE
Institution: University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
Section: Creativity 1
DOI number: https://doi.org/10.35199/epde2019.8
ISBN: 978-1-912254-05-7

Abstract

odel building have been proved to be very beneficial as they boost students’ creativity and resourcefulness and assist them in evaluating their ideas better. Nevertheless, their use of prototypes has still not been explored in depth to be clearly understood and transformed into explicit instructions for informing design education. The main goal of this study is to explore how students make use of prototypes and understand the reasoning behind their prototyping activities. This is achieved by identifying instances of prototype use in projects and performing a quantitative analysis according to the explicit purpose of their prototyping activities. The results confirm students’ limited scope of prototype use during the early design stages, show their unfamiliarity with prototypes’ less explored roles and present the purposes which cause the highest level of project effectiveness. Such results could lead to the creation of a framework of guidelines which presents the prototyping process in a more structured way, aimed at engineering design students and design education practices.

Keywords: Prototyping, Engineering Design, Prototype Purpose, Student Projects, Design Education

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