Intelligent Design Assistants for Decentralized Collaborative Design

Summary

We study the effect of intelligent design assistants on the behavior and performance of designers. The focus is decentralized engineering design tasks where a team of human designers, each designer responsible for a specific design aspect, collectively tries to produce a design that meets the design requirements. The experiment is done in person in a conference room in the mechanical engineering building. We collect data on design actions, communication between designers through a chat interface, and resulting performance. Through this data, we study how interventions from an intelligent design assistant affect the decision-making behavior and performance of human designers. The resulting analysis will guide the design of effective design assistants that augment human performance.

Eligibility

Currently recruiting participants: Yes

Eligible ages: 18 to 60

Accepts healthy participants: Yes

Inclusion criteria:

All subjects must have some engineering design experience either as part of their course or their work.

1) Engineering undergraduate students 3rd year or above
2) Engineering graduate students with an engineering BSc degree
3) Working professionals with an engineering undergraduate degree

Exclusion criteria:

We exclude 1st and 2nd-year students as we need the participants to have some type of engineering design experience. The specific engineering design experience they have need not be similar to what we have in the study. However, some type of engineering design experience is required. By engineering design experience, I refer to a process that starts with some requirements that need to be met and they engineer a product/design/artifact which meets those requirements.

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Method of contact

Additional information

Contact information

Email the Principal Investigator

Principal investigator:

Joseph Thekinen

Clinical trial:

No

REB-ID:

REB21-2067