Coherence and correspondence in engineering design evaluations

Much of the formal education in engineering design focuses on the teaching of analytical methods. Analysis allows one to make coherent statements about the performance of designs. There are situations in design and design education, however, where it is appropriate to use intuition: A focus on intuition sometimes allows one to make statements that correspond well with the real performance of designs. Here we studied such a situation. Students in a design course competition were asked to make quick evaluations of the performance of other students' designs. The surveys also contained either analysis-inducing questions or intuition-inducing questions. We found that the students put in the intuitive, correspondence-based mode, evaluated design performance more accurately. While, given this finding, the correspondence mode is more appropriate in this situation, we found a lack of consensus among design instructors and practitioners about which mode would be more effective. In sum, our results indicate that the engineering curriculum should include methods of correspondence-based, intuitive decision-making and that instructors should be sufficiently aware of these methods to help students identify situations where they should be employed. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.