Undergraduate Courses to Professional Engineering Design: A Disconnected Trajectory?

This exploratory, ethnographic study compares engineering design in different organizational settings, as a way of examining the nature of claimed disconnects between professional engineering design practices and those taking place in the undergraduate engineering curriculum.The focus in this research is on three different design contexts.Two are set in a large public university in the United States, a general engineering freshman cornerstone design course and a senior Mechanical Engineering design capstone course.These were analyzed through observations and other ethnographic methods.The third design setting is professional engineering companies.This setting was analyzed through the research team's experiences working on design teams for multiple companies.Data suggests that engineering education and industry organizational contexts constitute processes of design differently.These findings challenge the typical rhetoric that undergraduate education project courses are intended to provide students with real-world design experiences.