What Happens When Biomedical Engineering Students and Product Design Students Design Medical Devices Together? Evaluating a New Collaborative Course

Engineers and product designers often collaborate in industry to bring products to market, since each profession brings a unique skill set. However, intentional interdisciplinary collaborations are not typical during undergraduate education. This paper describes the initial outcomes of a collaborative course in which 3rd year undergraduate product design students work together with a 4th year biomedical engineering capstone course to design medical devices. The course has been run two times and based on the project outcomes and the student experiences in the first iteration, substantial changes were made for the second iteration of the course. The biomedical engineering capstone course lasts for an entire school year, but the collaboration with the product design students is only designated for one semester. The first iteration of the interdisciplinary collaboration took place during the spring semester of the capstone course. Because the biomedical engineering capstone involves primarily prototyping in the spring semester, this left very little conceptual design work with which the product design students could be involved, as the design concepts were already finalized. Thus, one major change was to move the collaboration to fall semester so that the product design students could be involved in the initial stages of the design process. Another change was the makeup of the teams. In the first iteration, the product design students acted collectively as a “design consultancy,” with sub teams focused on specific biomedical engineering capstone projects. In the second iteration, the product design students were distributed among all the teams so that each team included four or five biomedical engineering students and one product design student. We present a comparison of the two iterations by analyzing data drawn from multiple sources. In addition to an analysis of course evaluations, surveys of students, and interviews with students, we present a rubric-based comparative analysis of the project outcomes from the first semester student reports during the first two iterations of the course. Our results indicate that the course was improved in the second iteration, particularly as it pertains to the students' experiences. However, our results also point to further areas of future improvement. The results may be used by engineering and design educators to understand the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary capstone course and to understand how to best organize multi-college interdisciplinary capstone design courses.