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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Cad Vs. Sketching: An Exploratory Case Study, David Veisz, Essam Z. Namouz, Shraddha Joshi, Joshua D. Summers Aug 2012

Cad Vs. Sketching: An Exploratory Case Study, David Veisz, Essam Z. Namouz, Shraddha Joshi, Joshua D. Summers

All CEDAR Publications

This paper presents a preliminary comparison between the role of computer-aided design (CAD) and sketching in engineering through a case study of a senior design project and interviews with industry and academia. The design team consisted of four senior level mechanical engineering students each with less than 1 year of professional experience are observed while completing an industry sponsored mechanical engineering capstone design project across a 17 week semester. Factors investigated include what CAD tools are used, when in the design process they are implemented, the justification for their use from the students' perspectives, the actual knowledge gained from their …


Evaluating The Use Of Functional Representations For Ideation In Conceptual Design, Benjamin Caldwell Dec 2011

Evaluating The Use Of Functional Representations For Ideation In Conceptual Design, Benjamin Caldwell

All Dissertations

Functional representations are often used in the conceptual stages of design because they encourage the designer to focus on the intended use and purpose of a system rather than the physical solution. Function models have been proposed by many researchers as a tool to expand the solution search space and guide concept generation, and many design tools have been created to support function-based design. These tools require designers to create function models of new or existing artifacts, but there is limited published research describing what types of functions should be included in a model or the appropriate level of abstraction …


User Study Of Information Extracted From Engineering Representations, Rachel Hannah Dec 2009

User Study Of Information Extracted From Engineering Representations, Rachel Hannah

All Theses

It is important for designers to understand the usefulness of different engineering representations in order to save time and money throughout a project. Designers often rely on past experience to decide which model to construct; yet students without this experience have no help. Interestingly there are noticeable gaps in the research literature with respect to how and when to select representations and modeling approaches for engineering designs. This thesis examines the differences between three types of engineering representations, specifically sketches, drawing packages, and physical prototypes. The amount of information designers can extract from these representations and also the correctness and …


A Study In The Information Content, Consistency, And Expressive Power Of Function Structures In Mechanical Design, Chiradeep Sen May 2009

A Study In The Information Content, Consistency, And Expressive Power Of Function Structures In Mechanical Design, Chiradeep Sen

All Theses

In engineering design research, function structures are used to represent the intended functionality of technical artifacts. Function structures are graph-based representations where the nodes are functions, or actions, and the edges are flows, or objects of those actions. For the consistent description of artifact functionality, multiple controlled vocabularies have been developed in previous research. The Functional Basis is one such vocabulary that provides for a set of verbs and a set of nouns, organized in the three-level hierarchy. This vocabulary is extensively studied in design research. Two major application of this vocabulary are the Design Repository, which is a web-base …