Current design models, approaches and theories are highly fragmented, have seldom been compared with one another, and rarely attempted to be consolidated. Novelty is a measure of creativity of engineering products and positively influences product success. Using physical laws and effects for designing can improve the chances of creativity but they cannot be used directly owing to their inadequate current representations. It is important to address activities, outcomes, requirements and solutions in designing. Conceptual design is an early phase in engineering design and needs to be supported better. A systematic approach for designing often increases effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, the broad objective of this thesis is to develop and validate a comprehensive understanding of how designing occurs during the conceptual phase of engineering design, and to support variety and novelty of designs during this phase. The approach followed is: (a) formulate and validate an understanding of novelty and its relationships to the designing constructs, in current designing, and(b)develop and validate a support, founded on the current designing, to improve novelty. The understanding and the support are addressed, respectively, through an integrated model and a systematic framework for designing; the model and the framework comprise activities, outcomes(including laws and effects), requirements and solutions. An integrated model of designing, GEMS of SAPPhIRE as req-sol is developed by combining activities(Generate, Evaluate, Modify, Select– GEMS), outcomes (State change, Action, Parts, Phenomenon, Input, oRgans, Effect–SAPPhIRE), requirements (req) and solutions (sol), identified from a comprehensive survey of existing design models and approaches. Validation of SAPPhIRE model with existing systems indicates that the model can be used to describe analysis and synthesis, both of which together constitute designing. Validation of the integrated model using existing videos of design sessions, to check if all its constructs are naturally used in designing, reveals that:(a) all the constructs are naturally used;(b) not all the outcomes are explored with equal intensity;(c) while high numbers of action and parts are observed, only low numbers of phenomenon, effects and organs are found. Empirical study using another set of design sessions to study the relationships between novelty and the outcomes reveals that novelty of a concept space depends on the variety of the concept space, which in turn depends on the variety of the idea space explored. Novelty and variety of a concept space also depend on the number of outcomes explored at each abstraction level. Thus, phenomena and effects are also vital for variety and novelty. Based on the above, GEMS of SAPPhIRE as req-sol framework for designing is proposed. The framework is divided into: Requirements Exploration Stage(RES) and Solutions Exploration Stage(SES). In RES and SES, requirements and solutions respectively at all the abstraction levels including SAPPhIRE are generated, evaluated, modified and selected. The framework supports task clarification, conceptual and early embodiment phases of designing, and provides process knowledge. Comparison of the framework against existing design models, theories and approaches reveals that:(a) not all existing models, theories and approaches address activities, outcomes, requirements and solutions together;(b) those that address all these constructs together do not make a distinction between requirements and solutions; and(c) no model or approach explicitly addresses novelty. The usability of the framework and Idea-inspire is assessed by applying them in an industrial project for designing novel concepts of lunar vehicle mobility system. The use of this combined support enables identification of critical requirements, development of a large variety of ideas and concepts. One of these concepts is physically and virtually modelled, and tested, and is found to satisfy all the requirements. A catalogue of physical laws and effects is developed using SAPPhIRE model to provide assistance to designers, especially for phenomena, effects and organs. Observations found during this development are reported. A comparative validation of the framework and the catalogue for their support to design for variety and novelty is done using comparative observational studies. Results from the observational studies reveal that the variety and the novelty of concept space improve with the use of the framework, or with the frame work and the catalogue, as compared to variety and novelty with no support.

Extreme event populations are encountered in all domains of civil engineering. The classical and Bayesian statistical approaches for describing these populations are described and compared. Bayesian frameworks applied to such populations are reviewed and critiqued. The present Bayesian framework is explained from both theoretical and computational points of view. Engineering judgement and regional analyses can be used to yield a distribution on a parameter set describing a population of extremes. Extraordinary order events, as well as known data, can be used to update the prior parameter distribution through Bayes theorem. The resulting posterior distribution is used to form a compound distribution, the basis for estimation. Quantile distributions are developed as are linear transformations of the parameters. Examples from several domains of civil engineering illustrate the flexibility of the computer program which implements the present method. Suggestions are made for further research. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Civil Engineering, Department of / Graduate

Teams of design engineers are increasingly working as members of virtual teams, or teams whose members are distributed geographically and communicate mostly through electronic means. In addition, emerging multi-user (MU) applications engage complementary teams in synchronous design activities. These new MU tools are changing the way engineers work together. Together, these factors have created a new and interesting environment in which engineering design teams must function. The work presented here lays out two major themes that teams and their managers can effectively apply to organizing and managing MU teams: 1) teams can maximize their potential productivity by determining the optimal number of teammates for a given modeling effort and by implementing a profile and team formation system based on the principle of optimizing complementary team member characteristics; and 2) to minimize process losses, teams can implement effective strategies for working in a MU and/or virtual setting and they can use novel new MU tools that address portions of the product development process that have previously not been addressed with such tools. It is my hope that these contributions can enable greater effectiveness and productivity among virtual engineering design teams as they strive to remedy many of the most pressing and dire issues facing humanity. By improving the way we work together, we can increase our ability to bless all of God's children.

Analysis and visualization of large data sets is time consuming and sometimes can be a very difficult process, especially for 3D data sets. Therefore, data processing and visualization techniques have often been used in the case of different massive data analysis for efficiency and accuracy purposes. This thesis presents a multi-scale data sketching solution, specifically for large 3D scientific data with a goal to support collaborative data management, analysis and visualization. The idea is to allow users to quickly identify interesting regions and observe significant patterns without directly accessing the raw data, since most of the information in raw form is not useful. This solution will provide a fast way to allow the users to choose the regions they are interested and save time. By preprocessing the data, our solution can sketch out the general regions of the 3D data, and users can decide whether they are interested in going further to analyze the current data. The key issue is to find efficient and accurate algorithms to detect boundaries or regions information for large 3D scientific data. Specific techniques and performance analysis are also discussed.

Engineering designers commonly make sequential information acquisition decisions such as selecting designs for performance evaluation, selecting information sources, deciding whom to communicate with in design teams, and deciding when to stop design exploration. There is significant literature on normative decision making for engineering design, however, there is a lack of descriptive modeling of how designers actually make information acquisition decisions. Such descriptive modeling is important for accurately modeling design decisions, identifying sources of inefficiencies, and improving the design process. To that end, the research objective of the dissertation is to understand how designers make sequential information acquisition decisions and identify models that provide the best description of a designer’s decisions strategies. For gaining this understanding, the research approach consists of a synthesis of descriptive theories from psychological and cognitive sciences, along with empirical evidence from behavioral experiments under different design situations. Statistical Bayesian inference is used to determine how well alternate descriptive decision models describe the experimental data. This approach quantifies a designer's decision strategies through posterior parameter estimation and Bayesian model comparison. <br><br>Two research studies, presented in this dissertation, focus on assessing the effects of monetary incentives, fixed budget, type of design space exploration, and the availability of system-wide information on information acquisition decisions. The first study presented in this dissertation investigates information acquisition by an individual designer when multiple information sources are available and the total budget is limited. The results suggest that the student subjects' decisions are better represented by the heuristic-based models than the expected utility(EU)-based models. <br>While the EU-based models result in better net payoff, the heuristic models used by the subjects generate better design performance. The results also indicate the potential for nudging designers' decisions towards maximizing the net payoff by setting the fixed budget at low values and providing monetary incentives proportional to the saved budget.<br><br>The second study investigates information acquisition through communication. The focus is on designers’ decisions about whom to communicate with, and how much to communicate when there is interdependence between subsystems being designed. This study analyzes team communication of NASA engineers at a mission design laboratory (MDL) as well as of engineering students designing a simplified automotive engine in an undergraduate classroom environment. The results indicate that the rate of interactions increases in response to the reduce in system-level design performance in both settings. Additionally, the following factors seem to positively influence communication decisions: the pairwise design interdependence, node-wise popularity (significant with NASA MDL engineers due to large team size), and pairwise reciprocity.<br><br>The dissertation work increases the knowledge about engineering design decision making in following aspects. First, individuals make information acquisition decisions using simple heuristics based on in-situ information such as available budget amount and present system performance.<br>The proposed multi-discipline approach proves helpful for describing heuristics analytically and inferring context-specific decision strategies using statistical Bayesian inference. This work has potential application in developing decision support tools for engineering design. Second, the comparison of communication patterns between student design teams and NASA MDL teams reveals that the engine experiment preserves some but not all of the communication patterns of interest. We find that the representativeness depends not on matching subjects, tasks, and context separately, but rather on the behavior that results from the interactions of these three dimensions. This work provides lessons for designing representative experiments in the future.

<p>In the U.S, more than 5.6 million commercial buildings are in operation and some include offices, schools, and childcare centers. These large buildings have complex indoor plumbing and often drinking water chemical and microbiological safety hazards can go undocumented. Generally, the larger the building’s square footage, the greater number of building occupants potentially exposed to the drinking water and greater amount and complexity of indoor cold and hot water piping and appurtenances. Because commercial buildings routinely undergo periods of low to no water use (e.g., holidays, weekends) cold and hot water can stagnate in the plumbing. This stagnation can allow for chemical and biological drinking water quality safety to deteriorate. This thesis work was designed to examine water safety challenges in school, childcare center, and office buildings to address existing knowledge-gaps.<br></p><p><br></p><p>The study described in Chapter 1 was conducted to better understand the risks of elevated copper levels at U.S. schools and childcare centers. Study goals were to: (1) understand occurrences of copper in school and childcare center drinking water systems, (2) review acute and chronic health impacts associated with the ingestion of copper contaminated water, and (3) examine the effectiveness of remedial actions to address copper in drinking water. Of the more than 130,000 schools and 856,000 childcare centers in the U.S., only about 1.7% of all those facilities had copper drinking water testing data recorded in a federal Safe Drinking Water database since the database was created in 1992. Of these facilities that were designated public water systems, about 13% (2,332) had reported a copper drinking water exceedance. Over a period of 30 years, very few studies have been conducted to document copper levels in schools and childcare centers. Available studies reported widely different sampling protocols and remedial actions. Flushing copper contaminated water from plumbing was the most evaluated remedial action, but flushing sometimes needed to be repeated indefinitely because copper exceeded safe limits within hours after flushing stopped. In-building water treatment with ion exchange systems and orthophosphate corrosion inhibitor addition have been used. At present, there is limited data from testing for copper in schools and childcare centers as well as studies to aid building managers in identifying and remediating copper occurrences. <br></p><p><br></p><p>The study described in Chapter 2 was designed to better understand chemical and microbiological quality in a green office building due to weekend stagnation events (~60 hours per event). Specific goals were (1) to investigate characterize disinfectant, pH, as well as heavy metal and microbial contaminant levels at the building point-of-entry and fixtures throughout the building, (2) understand how water quality varied spatially and by fixture use frequency, and (3) investigate the effectiveness of remedial actions on removing the water quality problems identified. As-built plumbing drawings were used to create a sampling plan and flushing plan. The total chlorine concentration decreased during stagnation (p < 0.05) and was highest at the building entry point (max 0.8 mg/L), and lower throughout the building (max 0.28 mg/L). Total cell counts were greater on Mondays compared to Fridays (p < 0.05). Legionella spp. was highest at the fixture with zero water use recorded during the study. Copper and lead levels throughout the building increase over the weekend (p < 0.05). Copper exceeded the U.S. federal health-based drinking water limit (1.3 mg/L) at 4 of the 12 tested locations. These locations all branched off the same riser. Manual fixture flushing temporarily reduced copper levels, but copper rebounded quickly prompting the need to flush fixtures every 19 hours. Results showed that drinking water testing should be required for building water systems before occupancy permits are issued, and after an extended stagnation period to understand worst case conditions. Testing should include disinfectant level, copper, lead, and legionella. <br></p><p><br></p><p>This thesis research found that a general lack of water testing data for existing office, school, and childcare center buildings inhibited a wider understanding of water safety risks. It is recommended that building officials adopt water testing as a requirement for building occupancy certificates. Testing should also be conducted periodically during the life of the buildings especially after unusually long stagnation periods (e.g., shutdowns or holiday breaks), and in buildings where children or other sensitive populations (e.g., elderly or people with underlying conditions) are occupants. Testing should include disinfectant level, copper, lead, and legionella at the point of entry and multiple locations throughout the building, depending on fixture use and building occupants. Without water testing, occupants may continue to be exposed to water that does not meet federal safe drinking water limits and go undetected. If contamination is found, building managers should review the flushing plan and potentially consider point of use water treatment to address short- and long-term water safety problems. <br></p>

<p>Engineering engagement programs use service learning and community engagement pedagogies that require a real-world situated problem in which the community partners who experience those problems are integral to those spaces. Despite community partners being integral to engineering engagement programs, research on community partner perspectives is vastly unrepresented in literature Therefore, the goal of this work is to investigate engineering engagement programs from the perspective of the community partners by answering the research question: what meaning do community partners make of their experience in engineering engagement programs? This study describes a qualitative research inquiry in which interviews with three community partners from three different engineering engagement programs were conducted and analyzed for community partner meaning. Using a framework developed by Zittoun and Brinkmann for meaning making, this study presented several themes associated with pragmatic, semantic, and existential meanings made by community partners within this study (2012).</p><p>Findings from this study suggest implications for expansions of existing frameworks of constituents and components of engineering engagement programs, as well as potential opportunities to more deeply engaging community partners the assessment of student contributions and trajectories as a function of participation in EEPs. Additionally, findings from this study suggest an opportunity to investigate communication and thinking between students and community partners to better support the experience of the community partner (and potentially, the learning of the students). Lastly, findings from this study suggest that participation in EEPs presents the opportunity for community partners to learn by doing which can be more deeply investigated to begin addressing the gap in the literature associated with community partners in research on engineering engagement spaces.</p>

In 2013, developers of the Next Generation Science Standards implemented national K -12 directives and elevated engineering design to the level of scientific inquiry. Teaching design, however, is challenging to educators due to the complex nature of design problems, which cannot be solved via simple algorithms. Solving design problems requires a more reflective and iterative approach that emphasizes metacognitive skills like planning, monitoring, and taking another person’s perspective. Educators are further challenged by children’s immature metacognitive skills, which may be insufficient to engage in the entire design process. A qualitative study of paired seventh graders demonstrated a pragmatic learning activity for enhancing adolescent designs during their earliest phases through guided peer interactions with metacognitive prompts. Four distinct interaction styles were observed among the pairs. Each style varied by which verbal and social phenomena were used to make changes. The metacognitive prompts used in the learning activity can be adapted to any design challenge. Furthermore, an additional, exploratory case demonstrated a restructuring of the learning activity in which the metacognitive prompts were generated naturally by the students themselves. The student-generated prompts were design-specific and timely; delivered in the moment when a student was struggling with a design element. The result was a dynamic co-construction and co-ownership of the designs.

Education is always changing and science education is no exception, with many influential publications passing through science education over the years. The latest wave in science standards is called the Next Generation Science Standards. The Next Generation Science Standards are anticipated to have a significant effect on state science standards around the entire country. One thing about these new standards is very different from all previous science standards—they include the principle of engineering design in them. Asking science teachers to teach engineering design is asking them to teach a principle for which their teaching licensure would not have formally prepared them. Consequently, the hypothesis of this study was that the feeling of preparedness to teach engineering design would be low among public secondary education Utah science teachers. This study shows that hypothesis to be correct: Utah science teachers do not feel prepared to teach engineering design. The feelings of teacher preparedness can be improved through professional development and inclusion of engineering design into science teacher education programs. It should be infused into these arenas now that teachers have indicated their low feelings of preparedness. More teacher preparation should be sought because an unprepared teacher will not prepare students as well as a prepared teacher. And, creating prepared students is the goal of the education system.

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