2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education regularly overlooks people it is supposed to serve, especially those historically and systemically marginalized by technology. To address this, we must teach students of engineering to engage critically with who they are designing and work directly with communities living closest to systemic problems. This can be done through community-driven, participatory design where community-based lived experiences inform the development of technical solutions. This work is vital for identifying what problems need technical solutions, and the limitations of technical solutions in addressing systemic challenges. I will investigate what this means in my field of medical technology, rife with racism, sexism, ableism, due to most technologies being developed by those in power, that being white, cis, able-bodied men. I argue that systemically marginalized populations receive worse medical care because of technology and how it was designed. Embedding myself in the narrative, I detail my own experiences living in a chronically ill body as I experience the severe limitations of current technologies, and how that impacts my own health. Tracing legacies of resistance to dominant systems of power within biomedicine, I uncover the stories of lay experts challenging the existing "politics of knowledge" to democratize biomedical innovation for their own benefits. Weaving together theories of black feminism, queer liberation, disability justice, and embodiment with design justice and participatory design, I outline principles for engineering liberation through health innovation. These five principles include 1) understand the system shaping inequity 2) realize your positioning and power, at the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and (dis)ability 3) establish relationships with those closest to health disparities to root out root causes and stay accountable to potential harms 4) build technologies that create value for all parties while remaining "safe to fail" and 5) connect the innovation to a greater political strategy for achieving equity and liberation. This work in progress paper ends with a call to action for engineers to choose a side: do we serve as architects of the visions of the powerful, or the visions of the public? As architects of medical technology, our decisions shape who lives and thrives and who suffers and dies.