Idea generation in biomedical engineering courses using Design Heuristics

ABSTRACT

With increasing demand for improved medical equipment and healthcare, next-generation biomedical engineers need strong design skills. Equipping biomedical engineering students with tools for idea generation and development can increase student design success. Design Heuristics are an ideation tool developed through empirical studies of product designs. While identified in the mechanical engineering space, Design Heuristics may be applicable in biomedical engineering design. In our study, we implemented a Design Heuristics session during upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate biomedical engineering design courses. We examined the applicability of Design Heuristics within individual and team concept generation contexts. The findings demonstrated that biomedical engineering students were able to use Design Heuristics to generate multiple concepts, and that initial concepts produced using Design Heuristics were carried over into final team design. The results support the applicability of Design Heuristics to student idea generation in biomedical engineering design.     

Creative Potential within Policy: An Analysis of the 2013 English Literature Curriculum

This article takes as its focus Lefebvre's trialectic of conceived, perceived and lived spaces as a lens through which to scrutinise the 2013 English Literature Curriculum, and to explore the extent to which creative spaces might exist within that curriculum. The article analyses how the curriculum is envisaged by policymakers and how it might be expected to be translated into practice, utilising the wording of the policy document to facilitate an exploration of what its underlying intentions might be. The author's experience of teaching a poem from the new curriculum is used in order to provide illustrative examples of the ways in which teachers’ and learners’ experiences of the curriculum might, in practice, diverge from the direction envisaged by policymakers as teachers negotiate creative spaces within their classrooms.