Developing the Skill of Problem Definition Through Model Creation and Exploration

Problem definition is an extremely important part of the design process and yet there are few tools widely known and available to help novices and experts in the definition/diagnosis process [1-3]. The authors hypothesize in this pilot study that if novices gain experience “playing” with prototypical problems from common categories they will be better at identifying said categories in ambiguous contexts. Students were introduced to several classic model types in Industrial Engineering (IE) and given short numerical open-ended weekly assignments to explore a model’s assumptions, limitations, and ramifications. Students were then given realistic case studies and asked to diagnose them as an example of a prototypical problem as well as related questions and were scored accordingly. Students performed approximately 10% worse in their problem-definition task when they did not have experience engaging in an exploratory modelling assignment. The results of this pilot study suggest that the ability to diagnose problems well increases when students have engaged previously in numerical modelling tasks. It is therefore tentatively concluded that a key aspect of design education should include experiential knowledge and practice with key problem categories to enable expert-like breadth-first search instead of using a typical novice-like depth-first search.