2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Incorporating relevant contextual factors, e.g., socio-cultural, environmental, and industrial considerations, during design processes is required to develop solutions that function appropriately in their intended context of use, particularly in global health settings. Prior work has determined that “lacking the contextual knowledge needed” is a common reason for the failure of engineering projects intended for use in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Our prior work has investigated which contextual factors engineering designers consider and how they incorporate contextual factors into their global health design processes. In this study, we extended this prior research to compare the design behavior of novice and experienced global health engineering designers. As part of this research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with fifteen experienced design engineers who work on health-related technologies in LMICs. We also conducted semi-structured interviews and reviewed final reports from six mechanical engineering capstone teams working on global health-themed projects. While novices tended to aggregate many different “low-resource” contexts together, experienced global health designers exhibited a much more nuanced view of differences across unique LMIC contexts. We also identified that experienced designers regularly reframed their design problems and accounted for implementation decisions throughout their design processes, while novices viewed problem framing and implementation as largely outside the scope of their projects. In this study, we describe the preliminary conceptions of a framework that could support engineering design students during both curricular and co-curricular design activities. The framework guides students through multiple categories of contextual factors and provides examples and prompts for methods of incorporating contextual factors into decisions iteratively throughout their design processes in a curricular engineering design project. The findings from this work have implications for engineering design pedagogy and, ultimately, the potential to improve engineering graduates’ abilities to develop contextually suitable solutions.