January 2005 Journal of Engineering Education 103
CLIVE L. DYM
Department of Engineering
Harvey Mudd College
ALICE M. AGOGINO
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of California at Berkeley
OZGUR ERIS
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University
DANIEL D. FREY
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
LARRY J. LEIFER
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Stanford University
ABSTRACT
This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of
engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design,
and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly
reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering
curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then
detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to
teach, and outlining the research available on how well design
thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored
pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning
(PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on
its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year
cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally,
the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be
answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving
design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations
for research aimed at enhancing design learning.
Keywords: design thinking, project-based learning, cornerstone
courses, classroom as laboratory
I. INTRODUCTION
Design is widely considered to be the central or distinguishing
activity of engineering [1]. It has also long been said that engineer-
ing programs should graduate engineers who can design effective
solutions to meet social needs [2]. Despite these facts, the role of
design in engineering education remains largely as stated by Evans
et al. in 1990: “The subject [of design] seems to occupy the top
drawer of a Pandora’s box of controversial curriculum matters, a box
often opened only as accreditation time approaches. Even ‘design’
faculty—those often segregated from ‘analysis’ faculty by the cours-
es they teach—have trouble articulating this elusive creature called
design” [3]. Design faculty across the country and across a range of
educational institutions still feel that the leaders of engineering de-
partments and schools are unable or unwilling to recognize the in-
tellectual complexities and resources demanded to support good
design education [4].
Historically, engineering curricula have been based largely on an
“engineering science” model over the last five decades, in which en-
gineering is taught only after a solid basis in science and mathemat-
ics. (The “engineering science” model is sometimes unfairly charac-
terized as the “Grinter model,” an attribution that ignores many
other recommendations in the Grinter report [5], some of which
are being independently revived today.) The first two years of the
curriculum—which in many respects have changed little since the
late 1950s [6]—are devoted primarily to the basic sciences, which
served as the foundation for two years of “engineering sciences” or
“analysis” where students apply scientific principles to technological
problems. The resulting engineering graduates were perceived by
industry and academia as being unable to practice in industry be-
cause of the change of focus from the practical (including drawing
and shop) to the theoretical [7]. What is now routinely identified as
the capstone (design) course
1
eventually became the standard academ-
ic response, with the strong encouragement of the ABET engi-
neering accreditation criteria [7]. The capstone course has evolved
over the years from “made up” projects devised by faculty to indus-
try-sponsored projects where companies provide “real” problems,
along with expertise and financial support [7, 8].
The infusion of first-year design courses—later dubbed corner-
stone (design) courses [9] in the 1990s—was motivated by an aware-
ness of the curricular disconnect with first-year students who often
did not see any engineering faculty for most of their first two years
of study [10, 11]. During this period first-year project and design
courses emerged as a means for students to be exposed to some fla-
vor of what engineers actually do [12–14] while enjoying an experi-
ence where they could learn the basic elements of the design process
by doing real design projects (e.g., [15, 16]).
Though the presence, role, and perception of design in the en-
gineering curriculum have improved markedly in recent years,
both design faculty and design practitioners would argue that fur-
ther improvements are necessary [4, 17]. There have even been
formal proposals for curricular goals and assessment measures
Engineering Design Thinking,
Teaching, and Learning
1
The capstone course is a U.S. term for design courses typically taken in the senior
year. The term cornestone is a recent U.S. coinage for design or project courses taken
early (e.g., first year) in the engineering curriculum. It was intended to draw a dis-
tinction from and preserve the mataphor of the capstone course.

for design-based curricula (e.g., MIT’s Conceive-Design-Imple-
ment- Operate (CDIO) initiative [18]). This argument is driven in
part by a widespread feeling that the intellectual content of design
is consistently underestimated. Thus, section II provides defini-
tions of both engineering and design to set a context for what fol-
lows. It then reviews research on design thinking as it relates to
how designers think and learn, which is an important reason that
design is difficult to teach. Design thinking reflects the complex
processes of inquiry and learning that designers perform in a sys-
tems context, making decisions as they proceed, often working col-
laboratively on teams in a social process, and “speaking” several
languages with each other (and to themselves). Assessment data on
these characterizations are also discussed, although some of that
data derives from studies in contexts other than design.
Section III reviews research on project-based learning (PBL)
2
as
one of the more effective ways for students to learn design by experi-
encing design as active participants. Section III also outlines some of
the pedagogical issues and some assessment of cornerstone engineering
PBL and design courses and globally dispersed PBL courses.
Section IV identifies questions on research on design thinking
and design theory, on their relationship to design pedagogy, and on
design teaching and learning that remain open and worthy of further
study. Section V closes by making recommendations for further study
and action.
II. ON DESIGN THINKING
Definitions of engineering abound, as do definitions of design.
Sheppard’s characterization of what engineers do is especially rele-
vant: engineers “scope, generate, evaluate, and realize ideas” [2].
Sheppard’s characterization focuses on how engineers think and em-
braces the heart of the design process by highlighting the creation
(i.e., scoping and generation), assessment, and selection (i.e., evalua-
tion), and the making or bringing to life (i.e., realization) of ideas.
Pahl has argued that the knowledge of technical systems or analysis
is not sufficient to understand the thought processes that lead to suc-
cessful synthesis or design, and that studying those thought process-
es is critical to improving design methodologies [20].
What does the word “design” mean in an engineering context?
Why is this complex, fascinating subject so hard to teach? The defi-
nition of design adopted here sets a course for answering these
questions:
Engineering design is a systematic, intelligent process in
which designers generate, evaluate, and specify concepts for
devices, systems, or processes whose form and function
achieve clients’ objectives or users’ needs while satisfying a
specified set of constraints.
This definition promotes engineering design as a thoughtful
process that depends on the systematic, intelligent generation of
design concepts and the specifications that make it possible to real-
ize these concepts [16, 21]. While creativity is important, and may
even be teachable, design is not invention as caricatured by the
shouting of “Eureka” and the flashing of a light bulb. Design prob-
lems reflect the fact that the designer has a client (or customer) who,
in turn, has in mind a set of users (or customers) for whose benefit
the designed artifact is being developed. The design process is itself
a complex cognitive process.
There are many informative approaches to characterizing design
thinking, some of which are now detailed. These characterizations
highlight the skills often associated with good designers, namely,
the ability to:
 tolerate ambiguity that shows up in viewing design as inquiry
or as an iterative loop of divergent-convergent thinking;
 maintain sight of the big picture by including systems think-
ing and systems design;
 handle uncertainty;
 make decisions;
 think as part of a team in a social process; and
 think and communicate in the several languages of design.
A. Design Thinking as Divergent-Convergent Questioning
Asking questions emerges as a beginning step of any design pro-
ject or class in the problem definition phase [16]. No sooner has a
client or professor defined a series of objectives for a designed arti-
fact than the designers—whether in a real design studio or a
classroom—want to know what the client really wants. What is a
safe product? What do you mean by cheap? How do you define the
best? Questioning is clearly an integral part of design.
On the other hand, the majority of the educational content
taught in today’s engineering curricula is an epistemological ap-
proach, systematic questioning, where known, proven principles are
applied to analyze a problem to reach verifiable, “truthful” answers
or solutions. While it seems clear that systematic questioning de-
scribes analysis well, does it apply in a design context? One would
expect an affirmative answer to this question, in part because design
educators already argue that the tools and techniques used to assist
designers’ creativity are “…ways of asking questions, and presenting
and viewing the answers to those questions as the design process
unfolds” [16]. Further, since the accepted basic models of the de-
sign process (see, for example, Figure 2.4 of [16]) show iterative
loops between various stages of design, it is clear that questioning of
various kinds takes place at varying stages of the process.
Aristotle proposed that “the kinds of questions we ask are as
many as the kinds of things which we know” [22]. In other words,
knowledge resides in the questions that can be asked and the answers that
can be provided. Dillon identified a sequence of inquiry that highlights
a hierarchy in Aristotle’s approach: certain types of questions need
to be asked and answered before others can be asked [23]. For in-
stance, it would be unsound, misleading, and ineffective to question
or reason about the cause of a phenomenon before verifying its exis-
tence and understanding its essence. Aristotle’s ordering thus re-
veals a procedure, which constitutes the inquiry process in an episte-
mological context. Taxonomies of this procedure or inquiry process
have been extended to computational models [24], to the relation-
ship between question asking and learning [25], and to the types of
questions students ask during tutoring sessions [26].
One of the major strengths of today’s engineering curricula is
their ability to implicitly convey to engineering students that
Aristotelian procedure as a framework for approaching engineering
104 Journal of Engineering Education January 2005
2
The acronym PBL is also used in the education literature—originally in med-
ical education and more recently in discussions of college curricula such as business
and law—to signify problem-based learning, in which abstract theoretical material is
introduced in more “familiar,” everyday problem situations [19]. The two PBL’s
have some common goals and implementation features, but they are nonetheless
distinct pedagogical styles.