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Abstract: This paper discusses the role that qualitative methods can and should play in engineering systems research and lays out the process of doing good qualitative research. As engineering research increasingly focuses on sociotechnical systems, in which human behavior and organizational context play important roles in system behavior, there is an increasing need for the insights qualitative research can provide. This paper synthesizes the literature on qualitative methods and lessons from the authors’ experience employing qualitative methods to study a variety of engineering systems. We hope that by framing the key issues clearly, other engineers who hope to join the qualitative path will build on what we have learned so far to enable greater insight into engineering systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how humans decompose design problems will yield insights that can be applied to develop better support for human designers. However, there are few established methods for identifying the decompositions that human designers use. This paper discusses a method for identifying subproblems by analyzing when design variables were discussed concurrently by human designers. Four clustering techniques for grouping design variables were tested on a range of synthetic datasets designed to resemble data collected from design teams, and the accuracy of the clusters created by each algorithm was evaluated. A spectral clustering method was accurate for most problems and generally performed better than hierarchical (with Euclidean distance metric), Markov, or association rule clustering methods. The method's success should enable researchers to gain new insights into how human designers decompose complex design problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]