2025 Research Speaker Series
Cynthia J. Atman
Professor, HCDE
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6
4:30 – 5:20 p.m.
Sieg Building, room 134
Design Signatures: A Journey from Design Expertise to Design Awareness
In this talk I will present an edited version of a Distinguished Lecture I gave at the American Society of Engineering Education in 2024 where I trace my career path across the decades.
Below is the abstract for the original talk:
What does design look like? How do designers spend their time scoping out a problem, developing alternative solutions, and evaluating their designs? Are there typical patterns of engagement in design activities that differ depending on level of design expertise? Questions such as these guided my early research on engineering design processes.
To address these questions, I worked with many colleagues to collect data from a large number of individuals ranging in expertise who solved multiple design problems. Analysis of these data provides empirical evidence that as individuals gain expertise as designers, they engage in different patterns of design behavior. In recent years, I have been focusing on ways to bring these research results into the complex process of design teaching. What ties the efforts together is the following idea: every instance of a design process can be represented with a design signature – a tracing of design activities over time that can be represented as a timeline. These representations are effective tools for teaching undergraduate engineers to be aware of their own design processes.
In this presentation, I will share my “research-to-practice” journey from doing detailed, specific research on design expertise to navigating the complicated world of design teaching. I will talk about some of my detours and lovely side paths along the way, and the amazing communities that I have had the privilege to work with. My hope is that listeners can relate to the challenges and joys of my research-to-practice journey and/or be inspired to try out the idea of design signatures in their teaching.
About the presenter
Cynthia J. Atman is the founding director of the Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching (CELT), a professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering, and the inaugural holder of the Mitchell T. & Lella Blanche Bowie Endowed Chair at the University of Washington. She was director of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), a national engineering education research center that was funded by the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on design expertise, engineering design learning, considering context in engineering design, and the use of reflection to support learning. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Dr. Atman holds a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.
The HCDE Research Speaker Series is hosted Thursdays in Autumn Quarter by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Presentations are open to the public.