2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Human-centered engineering approaches, such as Contextual Engineering, acknowledge the importance of technical design in the sociocultural context, especially in situations where the societal problem is outside the engineer’s own sociocultural understanding. Yet little research examines how the designer’s social context impacts the design process. A keyword search of the literature using engineer(s/ing) and positionality within titles generates only 2 papers. Further, only Walji et al. describes their practical method for integrating concepts of the impact of social identity on design assumptions into the classroom. Within engineering, majority of research on positionality and other related concepts predominantly reside in the field of engineering education research. Similarly, the humanities and social sciences contain robust discussion in positionality, a rigorous approach for addressing how an individual's identity and life experience affect their perceptions and assumptions when building an understanding of subject populations. A gap in engineering design education literature exists, that which examines the integration of sociological concepts of identity and positionality into the curriculum. Here, we describe a classroom unit that could be incorporated into a multitude of design courses. Through this co-creative approach, students engage in a design activity to increase their understanding of positionality and recognize its place in technical design. Students (n=59) in the engineering course came from 9 engineering disciplines and 21 science and humanities majors, as the course generates interdisciplinary registration as a general education offering in the social sciences and non-Western societies. Within a lesson on social identity and positionality, students were asked to design their ‘perfect’ public restroom. As students completed designs, they were partnered and grouped to compare what design factors were considered and bathroom elements were included. Following the presentation of each group design to the class, students reflected on how their past experiences, values, and identities influenced their designs. After our in-class activity, 89.5% of students self-reported on a Likert scale that the activity increased their understanding of positionality a great deal or more. Out of the 57 responses to the anonymous survey, 100% of students reported that the activity increased their understanding of the impact of social identities on perception. This finding was triangulated through the inductive coding of students’ written social identity maps and positionality statements which were completed as a class assignment. These results demonstrate the success of our curriculum to expose students to the ways positionality inherently effects engineering design while affording students the opportunity to successfully apply these concepts. As engineering education works to become more just and inclusive, future practitioners must be taught awareness of their own positionality and given skills to mitigate its negative impacts on others within design.