Larry Leifer - US grants

Proposal : IIS-0230450
Institution: Stanford University
PI: Larry Leifer


This project, entitled "Accelerating globally Distributed Team Innovation: Building an Experimental Testbed to Leverage Digital Libraries in the Transformation of Design Engineering Education" is a collaborative effort of Stanford University and Strathclyde University, Scotland. The project also informally engages partners at other institutions. The project proposes the development, implementation and use of a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students participating in global team based design projects. The project aims to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught by combining the use of digital libraries with virtual design studios. The goal of the project is to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology.

The Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE) at the University of Washington is advancing the scholarship of engineering learning and teaching through a partnership with Stanford University, Colorado School of Mines, the University of Minnesota, and Howard University. CAEE is a multifaceted Higher Education Center for Learning and Teaching clustered around three core elements: Scholarship on Learning Engineering, the Program for Enhancing Engineering Teaching, and Annual Engineering Education Institutes. The Center's Scholarship on Learning Engineering includes cross-institutional longitudinal research studies on learning to engineer focusing on the development of engineers from undergraduate education through entry into the engineering workforce and targeted studies of core competencies and concepts central to engineering. Professional development activities under the Center's Program for Enhancing Engineering Teaching (PEET) include the identification of resources to help engineering faculty address teaching challenges, thematic and research-to-practice workshops for future and current faculty, an engineering teaching portfolio initiative for graduate students, and the development of the Engineering Teaching Source, a web-based tool to enable engineering educators and instructional developers to locate high quality teaching resources. Annual Engineering Education Institutes for engineering faculty and graduate students build and sustain the community of engineering education scholars. The Institutes are advancing the engineering education research infrastructure by increasing the number of people able to conduct rigorous research and to become leaders in engineering education research and change agents in engineering education. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources and the Division of Engineering and Education Centers in the Directorate for Engineering.

Engineering education faces persistent shortcomings in the recruitment and retention of women and minorities. One factor contributing to this multifaceted problem is a lack of student confidence in abilities and knowledge related to engineering practice. Our theory-of-change predicts that three experiential elements must be integrated to build confidence; students must:1) experience their own thinking in engineering activities; 2) create and see tangible evidence that they have formulated and solved interesting engineering problems; and 3) be guided to maximize the benefits of elements 1 and 2.

To address these issues, we are providing freshmen with a learning experience that will allow them to make informed choices in favor of engineering before they have acquired the fundamentals. We are accomplishing this by developing and evaluating a new instructional strategy-Folio Thinking-in a freshman engineering seminar at Stanford University, Designing the Human Experience: Design Thinking Theory and Practice. Folio Thinking is an innovative pedagogical paradigm aimed at increasing the intellectual self-confidence of prospective engineering majors by raising their awareness of their engineering aptitudes, knowledge, and skills by guiding students through the process of creating learning portfolios. Creating the portfolio is itself an important learning experience and our primary assessment instrument.

We are collaborating with engineering faculty members from other institutions to develop a rubric for evaluating the student portfolios. This project will deliver: a detailed online case-study; a corpus of data open to study by educators and engineering faculty; and a model of Folio Thinking pedagogy (assignments, supporting tools, and materials) for re-use, re-design, and re-deployment nationally and internationally. We expect that students will seek out these courses and that faculty will find the above materials useful in a wide array of introductory and advanced engineering courses that attract and maintain a diverse engineering student body.

This grant provides funding to conduct a series of workshops on Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline to be held over a 12 month period. Workshops will be held at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and in conjunction with the 2009 NSF CMII Grantees Conference and the 2009 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences. These workshops will address issues related to supporting the emerging discipline of design through graduate education and interdisciplinary design research. Participants from a broad range of disciplines, including engineering, architecture, industrial design, visual arts, psychology, and business, among others, will be invited to attend.

Design is an integrative activity that spans many disciplines; however, our educational system often struggles to provide interdisciplinary design experiences for our undergraduate and graduate students and to recognize the significance of design research. Recently, new and innovative interdisciplinary graduate programs in design have arisen with strong ties to engineering yet structured to fully embrace and complement research from other disciplines. These graduate programs have the potential to influence the development of a new discipline of design that includes both education and research. Interdisciplinary education is a central factor in expanding and sustaining an American competitive advantage in today's global economy. Developing design as a broadly recognized and practiced instructional discipline is essential for maintaining leadership in the innovation of new products and systems. This series of workshops will bring together experts in the field of engineering design research and education and the larger design community to explore the challenges, successes, practices and future directions of interdisciplinary design graduate programs to gain insight into how to construct, grow, and sustain programs that prepare students for successful design innovation. If successful, this series of workshops will form the basis of new approaches to design education and research that fully embraces interdisciplinary collaborations within the current structure of academia.

The research objective of this EArly concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award is to quantitatively measure, model, and understand the relationships between engineering design behavior (actual engineering activity), problem solving preference (individual psychological predisposition), and real-time physiological responses of engineers (EEG, ECG, and other physiology telemetry data). It will result in an engineering design measurement system that will help improve decision analysis models by reducing individual behavior-based uncertainty, as well as data that will support the formation and optimization of design teams, enabling new insights into the interactions between engineering designers and their contextual environments (e.g., computational and collaborative tools, spaces, and machines). This research will facilitate the integration of analytical creativity and structured engineering approaches with the less structured creativity of divergent rapid prototyping to enable design teams and technical organizations to increase the level of transformation, speed, and value of their product/system development and design processes.

If successful, the results of this research will provide insight into the underlying cognitive processes taking place as engineering designers make decisions (alone and in teams), including the relationship between the amount of stress experienced under different amounts of uncertainty based on the type of design activity and the problem solving preference of the individuals. The results will enable the development of new supportive tools and environments to assist in the resolution of complex engineering challenges, while taking the individual psychological predispositions of the engineers and the specific divergent or convergent nature of the design activity into account. This knowledge will enable the facilitation of mental pivoting between the divergent and convergent engineering design phases, as well as the maximization of each individual engineer's participation and output in both phases.

Engineering design is a social-technical activity commonly practiced in teams. Understanding how engineers interact and work in teams is central to the understanding of technical innovation, and consequently, to industry efforts to improve the quality of technical innovation in the U.S. In this research, engineering design teams from industry will be directly observed in order to develop a new integrated model of High Performance Design Teams (HPDTs). The behavioral interactions and individual cognitive characteristics of the team members will be assessed, along with the products of the team sessions. The individual characteristics of the team members and their behavioral interactions will be mapped in relation to their performance in terms of innovative design to identify the behavioral building blocks of design teams that produce high performance outcomes. Identification of these behavioral building blocks will have a broad impact on current design practice and future research by providing the basis for developing scientific models of and new tools for improving engineering design teams in complex industry environments. Positive impact on engineering education will occur through transferring to students an explicit understanding of what accounts for high performance design and how one behaves in order to achieve it.

This project will develop a new model of the building blocks that characterize High Performance Design Teams (HPDTs) based on their behavioral interactions and individual characteristics. Engineering design teams from industry, that will be recruited on a performance gradient from high to low performance, will be observed. Team behaviors will be analyzed using the Interaction Dynamics Notation (IDN), while individual characteristics will be assessed through the Kirton Adaption-Innovation inventory (KAI) and the Engineering ABAKAS (Assessment of Behaviors, Attributes, Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills). These data will be synthesized with performance data from each team to create a descriptive model of the essential building blocks of High Performance Design Teams (HPDTs). This project will be the first to combine in application the IDN to model team behavioral interactions, the KAI to measure individual cognitive style, and the Engineering ABAKAS to assess engineering innovativeness. The new descriptive model of HPDTs resulting from this novel combination of approaches will have the potential to transform the way engineering design teams in industry are selected, trained, and managed in the search for high quality innovative products and services. The research methods applied will enable engineering and design researchers and practitioners to understand how highly effective teams operate at a granular level based on who they are, how they behave, and what they produce.

This planning grant’s long-term aim is to create assessment and informatics tools that empower Crisis Line Workers (CLWs) to self-monitor, develop skills, and better manage both their personal wellbeing and counseling performance. Counseling hotlines are a critical part of the informal healthcare system, providing immediate mental health support through telephone or text messaging. Such services have proven effective at decreasing hopelessness, psychological pain, and suicidality. Research finds 18–24 year olds and students disproportionately experience these psychological issues, contributing to a recognized escalation in mental health problems on college campuses nationwide. At the same time, the nature of the work puts CLWs themselves at high risk of burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. In turn, such distress negatively impacts CLWs' job performance, creating a cycle of distress and vulnerability for both CLWs and the clients who depend on them. Our scope is campus and campus-adjacent crisis line organizations (CLOs) and CLWs who manage the underserved mental health needs of college populations. Insights from this project could improve worker welfare, job performance, and client welfare for broader contexts involving high-stress, high-stakes work that employs information communication technology to serve clients in need of support. This agenda tightly aligns with FW-HTF objectives given recent shifts in future crisis line work, workers, and technology. Specifically, while CLOs traditionally managed physical call centers with training programs for workers, many new services allow CLWs to train online, field communications from home, and more flexibly self-define schedules. Further, our initial interactions with CLO partners indicate campus counseling centers are moving away from on-call staffing to outsourcing crisis line support to vendors that provide around-the-clock services and interaction reports that counselors follow up on as needed. In addition, while originally limited to telephone calls, crisis services are increasingly being delivered through modern information communication technologies, including text messaging and web applications. Finally, “smarter” features are increasingly being utilized within such platforms to automate responses or help triage communication. Together, these changes are impacting the practices of crisis line work as well as the skills expected of workers due to emerging technologies augmenting or replacing various aspects of CLWs’ efforts. At a high level, our work will inform focus areas as well as the types of monitoring technologies and interventions most likely to be accepted by CLOs and CLWs toward improving their wellbeing and welfare.

This project brings together several disciplines, including human-centered design, computer science and human-computer interaction, communication sciences and social behavior, and mental health assessment and intervention. The investigator team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals. First, by cultivating relationships with CLOs and undertaking needfinding engagements, we will deepen understanding of CLWs’ work circumstances, experiences, risks, and needs. Second, this discovery phase will produce design implications for self-monitoring and self-care tools for CLWs. Third, iterative co-design with CLWs will identify and initiate formative development of effective solutions (e.g., informatics, interventions) responsive to these requirements and clarify the potential impacts such tools can have on CLW personal wellbeing and professional practices and, in turn, client welfare. Overall, this project will solidify the team, partnerships, and foundational knowledge needed to pursue research at the level of a FW-HTF-R proposal. This project has been funded by the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier cross-directorate program to promote deeper basic understanding of the interdependent human-technology partnership in work contexts by advancing design of intelligent work technologies that operate in harmony with human workers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.