Thanks to the work of Professor Alice M. Agogino (UC Berkeley), this year’s workshop featured a collective thought board about design competencies with input from many of our participants. Here are the key points from the board, divided up into eight sections.

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Personal Qualities

• Comfort with ambiguity
• Tolerance for ambiguity
• Resourceful
• Persistent
• Open-mindedness
• Relax & have fun; good humor
• Be willing to step aside and have students step up.
• Student self-confidence to lead the show
• Risk-taking ability
• Confidence in ability to ask questions and come up with ideas
• Recovering from failure
• Proactivity (go ahead) & fearlessness (take risks)
• Giving credit where credit is due
• Collegiality & trust
• Ability to identify and actuate passion
• Humility
• Judgment on knowing when to get help
• Knowing when you’ve exhausted too much time plus resources to one design step
• Fail with grace
• Letting your idea go away
• Curiosity

Evaluation & Testing

• Comparing & evaluating solutions
• Modeling & analytical skills
• Ability to “listen to” tests, experiments with prototypes, etc.; exploit  what you hear and interpret (for debugging)

Creativity

• Ideation, brainstorming
• Offset with decision making tool to assess risk and potential failure
• Generate a variety of novel solutions that are feasible
• Think outside the box
• Creativity thinking skills
• Create unexpected solutions that are innovative

Problem & Opportunity Identification

• Problem identification
• Identify constraints
• Problem discovery problem definition situated in work, service learning, dorm rooms, etc.
• Ability to determine a market and assess a market opportunity
• Understanding context of problem you are solving
• Optimism, seeking opportunities (even among constraints)
• Identify customer needs and opportunities for innovation

Communication & Teamwork

• Oral/written communication
• If you can’t communicate with your team, client, or other stakeholder, you are handicapped
• Teamwork
• How to select the right kind of team members (i.e., identifying individual strengths)
• Be able to listen to others and really hear what they have to say

Knowledge Creation & Thinking Processes

• Abstraction
• Being able to transfer knowledge from on area to another area
• Asking good questions
• Ability to search the patent literature
• Know how to recognize unknowns/assumptions/ limitations
• Application of domain knowledge to other domains
• Ability to abstract and detail (rolling up/down in representations)
• Ability to think on multiple levels; what is in front of me; what was I doing before then next; what is this process about; how do I change this process
• Gather information
• Recognize you have a cultural lens
• Know how to get information
• Know what to record/save/document/share (when, why, who, how . . . )
• Ability to search for information . . . and critically analyze it . . . and categorize it . . . and determine its relevance
• Troubleshoot a non-functioning device or prototype to I.D. the root cause of a failure
• Critical thinking
• Knowledge capture, maintaining for re-use
• Learning to learn
• Ability to teach themselves
• Graduates should be able to self-assess their core competencies so as to seek out opportunities for improvements. Also they should be willing to unlearn defunct/obsolete knowledge, ambiguity their crystallized skills and reorganize their faculties to meet new challenges

Making  Things

• Prototyping skills
• Knowing when to model or prototype
• Building (less talk, more action)
• Use tools to build
• Iterative prototyping (i.e., build/ test, change, rebuild)
• Realization of multiple repetitions of divergence/ convergence process in idea generation
• To be able to build or provide required information to be able to manufacture a product. Building skills are generally required
• Implement an idea that can be built and mass-produced
• Sketching
• Drafting/CAD/SolidWorks

Technical Fundamentals

• 2nd order ODE’s
• Bernoulli
• Control volumes & transport
• Use engineering fundamentals to guide design and to model concepts to predict performance
• Functional identification
• Regardless of design or communication capability, students must develop technical competence – CORE to professional engineers
• Making user centricity real
• Building to learn
• Make innovation tangible and digestible
• Building collaboration not ownership
• Ability to search out information
• Critically analyze it
• Categorize it
• Determine relevance
• Ability to listen to tests, experiments with prototypes, etc..