Helping undergraduate engineering students learn effective design practices that are applicable to the modern workplace is one of the most complex challenges of engineering education. One strategy to help students master open-ended design projects is to use a systematic process. However, students often want to jump past the front end of the design process and this compromises the quality of the final product. This paper examines the suitability of Axiomatic Design in addressing this problem. Central to Axiomatic Design is early identification of uncoupled design parameters that address independent functional requirements. A new design process, incorporating Axiomatic Design methods along with the use of Acclaro software (http://www.axiomaticdesign.com) was developed in this work and piloted with several capstone design teams at the University of Idaho during the current academic year. Early indications are that these teams were more successful in establishing functional requirements that were more complete, more logically hierarchical, and more independent than other design teams. Furthermore, design ideas discussed by these teams seemed to be accepted or rejected on their own technical merits, rather than the force of the personalities of students who presented them. Thus, we have concluded that axiomatic design helps capstone teams produce higher quality design projects.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.