2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is an increased awareness that designers who develop technologies often do not possess the skills to successfully engage with communities, identify context-specific needs, and create solutions that address those needs. Not properly considering the context can lead to technologies that harm people directly or degrade social systems. Well-intended designs aiming to address social problems often suffer from minimal adoption and abandonment as there is a disconnect between technology designers and the needs of individuals who are the intended targets for technology adoption.

To address this gap, the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design at the University of Michigan developed the Social Engagement Toolkit (SET), a library of training on various topics related to socially engaged design practices. At a minority-serving institution, several workshops from the SET were implemented to support a semester-long, extra-curricular project experience for students majoring in Computer Science who aimed to design software solutions to address real-world problems. SET workshops on a number of topics, including an Introduction to Socially Engaged Design, Crafting Need Statements, Ecosystem Stakeholder Mapping, Interviews, User Requirements and Specifications, Idea Generation, and Concept Selection and Prototyping were used to provide scaffolding for students’ design projects and teach critical skills that are not often emphasized by the traditional curriculum.

Student reflection and exit survey data examined student learning experience along with the challenges of implementing skills they have learned. Students described the benefits of learning an effective design process to plan their projects, engaging with stakeholders to gather important information regarding their needs, and creating prototypes before coding. On the other hand, students perceived finding and interviewing appropriate stakeholders to be a challenge. This study demonstrates the overall process of implementing the SET to support students engaging in software development and examines students’ experiences.