Effective Inquiry for Innovative Engineering Design

Preface. 1: Introduction. 1.1. Why Study Question Asking? 1.2. Why Study Design Cognition? 1.3. Research Questions and Approach. 2: Question Asking: A Fundamental Dimension in Design Thinking. 2.1. Contemporary Topics in Design Research. 2.2. The Question-Decision Duality. 2.3. Learning from Existing Taxonomies of Questions. 3: Development of a Taxonomy that is Comprehensive of the Questions Asked while Designing. 3.1. Context for the Observations on the Nature of Questions Asked While Designing. 3.2. Definition of a Question. 3.3. An Argument for the Search for the 'Possible' and Its Characterization as Question Categories. 3.4. Comparison of the Taxonomic Approaches. 4: Hypothesis Generation in the Field: Shadowing the Design Team. 4.1. Grounded Principle for Hypotheses Generation. 4.2. Context of the Preliminary Observations. 4.3. Two Techniques for Capturing Design Activity in the Field and Generating Hypothesis. 4.4. Findings of the Field Research. 5: Designing the Intervention: Differentiating Designing from Problem Solving. 5.1. Deriving Requirements for the Design Experiment. 5.2. Addressing the Requirements. 5.3. Meeting the Requirements: The Pilot Experiment. 6: Learning from the Pilot Experiments: 'Good' Questions and Discoveries. 6.1. Improving the Experimental Methodology. 6.2. Augmenting the Hypotheses: Discovery Making as another Internal Performance Metric. 6.3. Refining the Hypotheses: Characterization of a 'Good' Question. 6.4. The Augmented Hypotheses. 7: Conducting the Redesigned Experiment: Putting the Question Asking Aspect of Design Cognition under the Microscope. 7.1. Data Collection and Analysis Procedures. 7.2. Data Analysis and Results. 7.3. Revisiting the Hypotheses. 8: Synthesizing a Question-centric Design Thinking Model. 8.1. Question Asking as a Process. 8.2. Question Asking as Creative Negotiation. 8.3. Question Asking as a Mechanism for Managing Convergent and Divergent Thinking Modes. 8.4. Implications of the Verified Hypotheses.