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A Comparison of Design Activity of Academics and Practitioners Using the FBS Ontology: A Case Study

Part of: Design Methods and Tools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Ada Hurst ,
Oscar G. Nespoli ,
Sarah Abdellahi  and
John S. Gero
Ada Hurst*
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo;
Oscar G. Nespoli
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo;
Sarah Abdellahi
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
John S. Gero
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
*
Contact: Hurst, Ada, University of Waterloo, Management Sciences, Canada, adahurst@uwaterloo.ca

Abstract

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Academics teach engineering design based on design theory and best practices, practitioners teach design based on their experience. Is there a difference between them? There appears to be little prior work in comparing the design processes of design academics and practitioners. This paper presents a case study in which the design activity of a team of academics was compared to that of a team of practitioners. The participants’ verbalizations during team discussions were coded using the Function- Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology. A qualitative comparison reveals that the team of practitioners constructs the design space earlier and generally spends more time in the solution space than the team of academics. Further, the team of practitioners has a significant number of direct transitions from function (F) to structure (S), while no such transitions are observed for the team of academics. Given that this is a single case study, the results cannot be used as the basis for any generalizations on how academics and practitioners compare. This is a successful proof of methodologies that lay the foundation for a series of hypotheses to be tested in a future study.

Keywords

Design cognitionDesign practiceDesign processDesign theoryOntologies
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 1323 - 1332
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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