Integrating design heuristics into your classroom

While successful concept generation is essential for innovative solutions, engineering students often receive limited instruction about how to accomplish it. Design Heuristics have been shown to facilitate concept generation by guiding students to explore additional solutions in the solution space. As adoption of new techniques into curricula is often slow, in this study, we investigated how four educators integrated Design Heuristics into their engineering design courses. We conducted interviews to investigate instructors preparations, approaches, and classroom experiences while integrating the Design Heuristics pedagogy as well as videotaped the teaching session. The findings revealed that both novice and experienced instructors reported few challenges in lesson preparation and implementation and a positive impact on student strategies to idea generation.