Dr. Jessica Menold will share and discuss her insights into re-imagining design in a more humanized approach, in her talk. This event, part of the ISTEP Engineering Education Seminar Series, will be of interest to all FASE faculty members graduate students and undergrad students whose academic activities and interests touch on this topic.
About the talk:
Design problems are marked by complexity, unknowns, and shifting requirement sets. Design itself is often taken to be a high-level cognitive ability. While the cognitive processes required to create, implement, and validate an innovative solution have been explored in previous work, the toll of such processes on designer cognitive state has not been identified.
This talk will review ongoing research efforts by the Technology and Human Research in Engineering Design Group to uncover the fundamental linkages between human designers, design processes, and designed products. This talk will review emergent research that demonstrates 1) the cognitive experiences of designers dynamically shift dependent upon the design task, 2) design processes and outcomes drive distinct rhetorical patterns, and 3) designers engage in distinct patterns of solution space exploration that are linked with design outcomes.
About the presenter:
Jessica Menold is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Design and Innovation and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is the director of the Technology and Human Research in Engineering Design lab and conducts research at the intersection of engineering design, manufacturing, and new product development. Her current work focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of new product development processes, integrating design thinking into engineering education, identifying the factors that contribute to or detract from the success of high-tech startups, and Design for Inspection in advanced manufacturing environments. Her work is dedicated to improving the design of engineered products and systems through evidence-based design methods, rapid prototyping, and performance analysis. Her work is supported by the United States National Science Foundation and the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Dr. Menold is also the Associate Director for Outreach and Inclusion at the Bernard M. Gordon Learning Factory, Penn State’s Makerspace.
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