Joran is a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University and a Co-Advisor with Professor Tahira Reid. He received the degree of D-PhD in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the Brigham Young University. His research focuses on how students abstract and solve complex problems in early design phases, with a special emphasis on functional decomposition and sketching/visualization. Other research interests include prototyping, engineering history, education, family science, and history. Joran spends his free time volunteering, playing board games, hiking, playing music, or spending time outdoors. His past projects include starting the Purdue Maker’s club, various sketching workshops, and simple robots. He recently finished an internship at IMMI, a top automotive safety products company. Joran is a member of ASME and the Order of the Engineer. You can find more information at http://joranbooth.wordpress.
Interventions for Teaching Sketching Skills and Reducing Inhibition for Novice Engineering Designers
Abstract: This paper explores improving sketching skills and reducing the inhibition to sketch for student designers. In the first study, students were taught sketching skills through an in-class workshop. The effect was evaluated using a pre-midpost test (n=40). In...
Empirical Studies of Functional Decomposition in Early Design
This paper explores functional decomposition in early design. In the first part of this study, we explore how the three most common methods (top-down, energy-flow, enumeration) affect concept generation for novice design teams (n=25). We found that nearly all the...
Comparing Functional Analysis Methods for Product Dissection Tasks
The purpose of this study is to begin to explore which function identification methods work best for specific tasks. We use a three-level within-subject study (n ¼ 78) to compare three strategies for identifying functions: energy-flow, top-down, and enumeration....
