This paper describes the findings of an experiment on how different engineers understand notions of function and functional breakdown in the context of design by modification. The experiment was conducted with a homogenous group of 20 design engineers, who had all received the same education. The subjects were asked to analyze how a hydraulic pump works and summarize their understanding in a function tree. The subjects were given either the hydraulic pump itself (with part of its casing removed) or a maintenance drawing that showed a section cut of the pump. This paper shows typical outputs of the designers. It discusses the different notions of function that the subjects had and the differences in the function trees they generated. The paper focuses an eight detailed analyses to show the range of approaches the subjects took.

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In order to understand the engineers' behavior while designing it needs to be revealed how the designer perceives function-shape-relations of a technical system. Eye tracking is a adequate method to observe the proceedings of the human analyzing technical systems. However, further information for concluding on the designer's perception is needed. Well-established methods in order to elicit further implicit and tacit knowledge are think aloud approaches. The combination thinkaloud and eye tracking is not yet observed in detail; especially how think-aloud influences the eye movements and which additional data is gained in the context of engineering design research. This paper presents an eye tracking study, which compares two think-aloud methods, concurrent and retrospective think-aloud, in combination with eye tracking. The results show no significant influence on the eye movements. However, the two think-aloud approaches generate differing contents of verbalizations and complement the recorded gaze data with different scopes.

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