The Nature of a Problem, Problem Diagnosis, and Engineering Design

This work has been motivated by the authors’ past explorations into engineering culture and engineering design which have both exposed the importance of and lack of problem definition in the engineering design process.  This paper builds on those previous works and reviews literature from the fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence as well as medical science.  Studies in cognitive science have identified that experts perform much better in the complex task of problem identification than novices and that scheme-based instruction can greatly ameliorate novice diagnostic performance in an ill-defined complex domain such as medical science. The authors argue that these results will transfer to the analogous ill-defined and complex domain that is engineering design.  In this case, the conclusion of this work is for engineering educators to develop schemes (templates) to describe in broad strokes the “universe of problems” in their particular field to aid their students in diagnosing problems for the purposes of engineering design.