Exploring if and how knowledge of a humanitarian disaster affects student design thinking

Abstract

Successful engineers increasingly need skills and knowledge beyond the technical know-how that engineering education has traditionally provided. To respond to the calls of ABET and NAE, engineering educators seek ways to emphasize and develop broad thinking. The work presented in this paper provides insight into how engineering education might broaden its coverage to better address such modern challenges as globalization, climate change, and issues of social justice. In this paper, we present new findings from a recent analysis of semi-structured interviews that were conducted during the spring of 2006 as part of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education's (CAEE) Academic Pathways Study (APS). These interviews of third-year engineering students at a large, public research university in the western U.S. took place immediately following a short design-scoping task (the analysis of which is reported elsewhere [1, 2 ]) that asked students what factors they would take into account in designing a retaining wall system to contain flooding of the Mississippi River. The follow-up interviews then asked the students to reflect on their design task responses and included questions about their knowledge of Hurricane Katrina, which had occurred the previous summer, and the influence such knowledge might have had on their responses. The research question driving this analysis can be articulated as follows: In what qualitatively different ways does knowledge of a humanitarian disaster influence student thinking on a conceptually related design task? Given the qualitative nature of the data and the exploratory nature of our research question, our analysis follows a descriptive approach that incorporates elements of phenomenography and primarily aims to capture the breadth and diversity of responses. Thematic analysis of twenty-five transcripts from one institution shows that, while many students indicated their knowledge of Hurricane Katrina did not influence their design task responses, others reported ways that it affected their thinking to varying degrees. The latter group of students described four major areas of concern: people, the natural environment, the designed artifact (i.e., the retaining wall), and aspects of the design process. Interestingly, all but one of the twelve students who indicated how Katrina knowledge influenced their responses said that it caused them to consider people issues, such as the societal impacts of engineering design and the importance of protecting human life. Thus, we observe that, for those students who saw the design task as related to the events of Hurricane Katrina, knowledge of these events elicited design thinking beyond the narrow confines of purely technical considerations. One practical implication emerging from this work is that framing or associating design problem-solving with certain kinds of real-world events might improve engineering students' capacity for broad thinking and concern for others-the kinds of competencies needed for addressing issues of sustainability, ethics, and social justice. Future work includes analysis of interview transcripts from three other institutions where these design tasks and post-task interviews were also conducted. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.