Functional analysis aims to decompose complex product main functions into manageable sub-functions. Novice and experienced designers have reported challenges with functional analysis such as high cognitive loads, and difficulties in identifying and expressing functions. Recently, interest in explicitly considering users during functional modeling has grown to enhance analysis completeness, but how this addresses commonly reported challenges is not clear. This research proposes and assesses a simple way to streamline user considerations for novice designers (i.e., embedding requirements into a user workflow explicitly) as a potential mitigation for some challenges in functional analysis at physical product early design stage. Analyses of the results indicate that workflow helps novice designers generate significantly more functions with correct syntax. In addition, the exploration space is prominently broader (especially at higher levels) when a workflow is presented as measured by the geometry of the generated tree diagrams. These results suggest that strategically incorporating user considerations in functional analysis, even in a simple way, has a positive effect in addressing commonly reported challenges of functional analysis. The better outcome from the functional analysis will likely be instrumental in later systematic conceptual design.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced college education to shift from face-to-face to online instruction. This effort is particularly challenging for freshmen and sophomore students, in engineering design projects where collaborations are needed. The study aims to qualitatively understand challenges and possible strategies revealed by students in remote design collaboration through the lens of an undergraduate-level engineering design introduction class. The authors closely observed team members’ struggles and how they handled them through bi-weekly and final reflections in a semester-long project. The challenges and strategies from 11 teams (42 students) were analyzed and implications for future engineering design education were discussed. The findings provide insights to experimentations that aim to establish a successful remote learning environment that reaches core education objectives of engineering design while also helping students adapt to a geographically distributed engineering workforce in future. The study also illustrated the usefulness of reflections as a tool to capture students’ learning dynamics.

Remote team collaboration was not familiar to many engineering students before COVID-19. The rapid shift from in-person to remote during the pandemic caused dramatic challenges, especially for freshmen and sophomore students in engineering design classes, where teamwork is typically needed to explore both the problem and solution spaces for ill-defined problems and students have had little previous design project experience. This study aims to explore challenges revealed by students in remote design collaboration through the lens of a sophomore-level class about early-stage engineering design. The authors closely observed team members’ struggles through three datasets collected in one semester: (1) team performance and survey responses in an in-class idea generation activity; (2) individual student final reflection essays about their semester-long team project at the end of the semester; and (3) bi-weekly individual reflections on the discussion board throughout the entire semester. Unlike the classic findings that sketches improve performance, we found significant positive correlations between teamwork experience (e.g., communication, efficiency, perceived contribution) and the number of ideas expressed in text, and significant negative correlations between teamwork experience and number of ideas expressed in a combination of sketches and text. Therefore, we propose educators should also work on improving students’ ability to express design ideas with text descriptions, on top of traditionally emphasized visual representations. In addition, we found the remote environment exacerbated existing team challenges more than it created new challenges. The remote-related challenges also dropped dramatically after the first few weeks and then remained steady. The remote-related challenges and their changing patterns indicate large potential to improve remote design collaboration.