Engineering Designers' Engagement and Inclusion of Diverse Perspectives in Engineering Work

Abstract

Engineering is a sociotechnical discipline. Sociotechnical aspects of engineering work manifest in the societal impacts of engineering, the interactions between engineers and other engineers and stakeholders, and the societal norms or biases that engineers embed in their work. Given the interconnected nature of modern engineering problems, it is crucially important that engineers recognize and attend to the sociotechnical aspects of their work. Thus, there is a need for tools and pedagogies that support engineers in engaging with sociotechnical aspects of engineering work.

Our goals for this dissertation were to: 1) deepen understandings of how engineering students and practitioners engage with sociotechnical aspects of engineering work and 2) identify aspects of engineering students’ and practitioners’ perspectives and approaches that are transferrable to other engineering contexts and may thus inform tools and pedagogies. Chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation investigated how engineering students and practitioners conceptualized sociotechnical aspects of engineering work based on their experiences. We synthesized eight statements that captured different sociotechnical aspects of engineering and, during interviews, asked participants to select two statements that aligned well with their experiences and two statements that did not align well. We also asked participants to share stories related to their selected statements and analyzed these stories to identify participants’ beliefs about engineering work resulting from their experiences. We found that engineering students and practitioners both highlighted their engineering collaborations, more so than other sociotechnical aspects of engineering work. However, engineering students and practitioners understood the importance of collaboration differently. Engineering students, in particular, indicated that effective collaborations did not require engineers to build close interpersonal relationships.

Chapters 4-6 investigated how engineering students engaged stakeholders in co-curricular and capstone contexts. Chapter 4 explored the needs assessment experiences of a co-curricular design team. During interviews, participants described several recommended practices for needs assessments, e.g., consulting diverse stakeholders, that they learned through their training and field work. Participants also described several challenges, e.g., accessing certain stakeholders, that impacted their approaches. Chapters 5 and 6 explored how six mechanical engineering capstone design teams engaged stakeholders to inform their projects. In Chapter 5, we analyzed recordings of participants’ meetings with stakeholders and identified 22 distinct information gathering behaviors that participants exhibited during their meetings. Half of these behaviors aligned with recommended practices, and half did not align. We built upon these findings in Chapter 6 by analyzing additional data, including interviews with participants. We uncovered two main trends: 1) participants prioritized domain experts as information sources and 2) participants preferred early and decisive information gathering meetings.

Based on our findings, we have several recommendations for engineering education, practice, and research. Instructors should highlight the diverse ways that engineering is a sociotechnical discipline, teach students a range of approaches for engaging stakeholders, support students in gathering and analyzing multiple types of stakeholder data, and structure students’ stakeholder engagement opportunities to encourage effective engagement approaches. In addition, engineering practitioners and students can use our lists of recommended stakeholder engagement practices in Chapters 4-6 to guide their stakeholder engagement approaches. Lastly, we recommend that engineering design and education researchers attend to the diverse ways that engineering is a sociotechnical discipline in their studies of engineering students and practitioners to more fully understand how various sociotechnical aspects of engineering work are connected.