Roles and Observations of a Graduate Design Coach

This paper discusses the roles that a graduate student coach experienced while working with an undergraduate design team in the development of a low, cost, low volume plastic injection modeling machine. Identified roles include: design tool teacher, design reviewer, project manager, and customer. A critique of the roles, including times spent in each role, is provided. This experience created generally higher satisfaction among the students and among the customers than had been previously seen in similar projects. Based upon this experience, it is justified to consider incorporating graduate design students as design coaches in senior design project teams.