Effective Inquiry for Innovative Engineering Design

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.- 8.1Question 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.-