This paper reports the progress of a three-year longitudinal study on the impact of design education on students' design thinking and practice. Students from two curricula at a large research-intensive state university are being studied. The control group is a major focused on engineering mechanics, which has little formal design education prior to the capstone experience. The experimental group is a mechanical engineering major that uses design as a context for its curriculum. A task-independent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) design ontology is utilized to provide a common basis for comparing students across projects and years. This paper presents results of two years of the study, which included students at the beginning and the end of their sophomore year, and at the end of their junior year. The results of analyzing and comparing the percent occurrences of design issues and problem-solution index from the protocol analysis of both cohorts are presented. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how students' design cognition is affected by a design course.

In this paper, we aim to identify different types of knowledge that needs to be conveyed during a conceptual design task. We hypothesize that different types of knowledge has different transferability in a partially distributed team setting, and thus influences team members' communication behaviors. The impacts due to different transferability of design knowledge are discussed.

In this work, we implemented a localized collective intelligence tool called the Tree of Knowledge that represents the on-going knowledge activities in a building. The Tree of Knowledge can increase the awareness of who knows what in the building and trigger more face-to-face interactions and collaborations. We pointed out the importance of localized, motivation, informal, and openness in designing such collective intelligence tools. Further applications and implications are discussed.

This paper presents first year results of a longitudinal study of how engineering students develop design competencies over time, and how these competencies are affected by design education. Using a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology, the authors are able to evaluate students' cognitive processes as they work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. In this paper, the authors analyze data from experiments that occurred before and after the participants completed a sophomore-level design course. The percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the first and second halves of each of the two experimental design sessions are analyzed and compared in order to identify differences in students' design behaviors. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students' design ability is affected by a design course.