UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF REQUIREMENTS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN BY NOVICES

Requirements play a critical role in the design process. The broader impact of this research is to develop a systematic understanding of the current use of requirements with an ultimate goal to develop guidelines and recommendations for more effective use of requirements throughout the design process. Thus, this research begins to answer the question about what is the role of requirements in design process and, specifically, its role in idea generation? The answer to this question is explored in three phases. The first phase is to understand how requirements are currently taught to students. To that end, two surveys were conducted. First, a review of ten design textbooks was conducted as an initial surrogate for understanding what is formally taught. This was done to understand the use of requirements within the design tools mentioned in the textbooks. Supplementing this, interviews of faculty involved in teaching design courses was conducted with faculty from mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, bioengineering, and materials science and engineering. While the interviews suggest that the use of requirements is distributed throughout the design process, in agreement wit