Abstract
For five years now Stanford’s Mechanical Engineering Design Division has experimented with restrictions on how students choose the members of their design teams. The constraints are based on voluntary student responses to a short questionnaire, essentially a sampling of questions from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator widely used for vocational and educational counseling. This has produced teams performing qualitatively and quantitatively better, as measured by prizes won in the nationwide Lincoln Foundation Design Competition, than did teams of the thirteen years preceding. In 1995, Stanford teams won all but two of the twelve prizes awarded. This article describes these experiments, lists the results, describes how to construct a suitable questionnaire, reviews pertinent psychological theory, and gives mathematically precise instructions for constraining construction of the teams. The current procedure also incorporates information obtained from a recent survey on team satisfaction in a different project design course. This modified method seeks to generate satisfied teams without sacrificing prize-winning ability.
