Fair asessment for engineering design?

The student's design #1

In our June study on engineering design in a high school, one student's designs caught my eye. The design challenge required students to use Energy3D to design a cluster of buildings in a city block that takes solar radiation into consideration, but this particular student came up with two neat designs.

The student's design #2

The student didn't pay much attention to the solar design part, but both designs are, I would say, hmm, beautiful. I have to admit that I am not an architect and I am judging this mostly based on my appreciation of the mathematical beauty (see Design #1) expressed in these designs. But even so, I feel that this is something worth my writing, because -- considering that the student absolutely did not know anything about Energy3D before -- it is amazing to see that how quickly he mastered the tool and came up with pretty sophisticated designs that look pleasant to my picky eyes. Where did his talent come from? I wish I had a chance to ask him.

And then the interesting story is that when I showed these designs to a colleague, she actually had a different opinion about them (compared with other designs that I think are not great). This reflects how subjective and unreliable performance assessment based on product analysis could sometimes become. While I cannot assert that my assessment is more justified, I can imagine how much efforts and thoughts this student put into these extremely well-conceived and polished designs (look how perfectly symmetric they are). This cannot be possibly the results of some random actions. A negative assessment might not do justice to this student's designs.

Which is why I had to invent the process analytics, an assessment technique that aims to provide more comprehensive, more trustworthy evaluation of students' entire design processes, not just on the final looks of the products and the evaluator's personal taste.