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This paper describes the findings from an empirical study carried out with engineers in senior roles within a large company manufacturing complex products. This research aimed to identify the types of knowledge that are important for design engineers. Twenty four knowledge categories were identified and the importance of these for design engineers in industry was investigated. In addition, the number of years of relevant experience required to become an expert in these types of knowledge was investigated. Knowledge related to the process was perceived as more important to those related to the product. However, the number of years to become an expert in process knowledge was found to be lower than for product knowledge, despite process knowledge being perceived as more important. The findings of this research contribute to the education and training of design engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a study to understand the use of analogies by design engineers with different levels of experience in an adaptive design domain. Protocol analyses of 12 design engineers have been analyzed to understand the functions and reasoning of the analogies. The protocols are real-world data from the aerospace industry. The findings indicate a significant difference in both the use of analogies by novices and experienced designers and the reasoning from the analogies. Novices were found to predominantly transfer information related to the geometric properties without explicit reference to relevant design issues or to the appropriateness of applying the analogy, whereas experienced designers tended to use analogies for problem solving and problem identification. Experienced designers were found to use the analogy to reason about the function of a component and the predicted behavior of the component, whereas the novices seem to lack such reasoning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]