2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Case Study of Student-Community Interaction through an Education-First Assistive Device Design Class

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) - Case Studies in Design Education

Assistive device design classes are popular and often incorporate local community members in projects as stakeholders, or need-knowers. It remains important to generate best practices to improve student-stakeholder interactions in these service-based classes, particularly those that focus on the early product design stages like need-finding and feels-like prototyping. This study is performed across two offerings of the new class “Augmenting Human Dexterity” at the University of California at Berkeley; it serves as a case study of the lessons presented, and resulting perceptions of its instructors and students. In the class project, students participate in need-knower identification and recruitment processes. In this preliminary study, we ask: what can students learn through this process? Given only a small handful of student groups produce a physical device that can be given to the need-knower at the end of the term for daily use, we ask: how do students portray this expectation? With the lessons provided, students expand their understanding of disability and accurately communicate expected deliverables to the need-knower at the time of recruitment and interview. This preliminary work must be followed by further studies in order to establish generalizable results. Regardless, we present potential methods for managing projects in assistive device classrooms that focus on early product design stages.

Authors

Prof. Hannah S. Stuart http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4628-6561 University of California, Berkeley [biography]

Hannah Stuart (Senior Member, IEEE, 2023) received the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA in 2018. She is the Don M. Cunningham Assistant Professor in mechanical engineering with the University of California at Berkeley, where she founded the Embodied Dexterity Group. Her research interests include design for human assistance, autonomous robots, haptics, and bioinspiration. Dr. Stuart is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Early Career Faculty Award.
Wilson Oswaldo Torres University of California, Berkeley [biography]

Wilson Torres is a Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a master’s degree in biology from Stanford University as well as a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in increasing access to healthcare through intervention design. Some of his work includes creating smartphone-based skin sensitivity measurements and clothing centered assistive technology.
Andrew I. W. McPherson http://orcid.org/0009-0009-4078-3971 University of California, Berkeley [biography]

Andrew “Drew” McPherson is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering in The Embodied Dexterity Group as a Regents’ & Chancellor’s and D Liebmann Fellow, and NSF DToD Trainee. He is also the board chair and co-founder of AbilityHacks, a nonprofit which brings together community members with disabilities and volunteers to teach and build solutions to disability-related challenges. Drew’s passion for creating assistive technology stems from his own experience of becoming paralyzed. He was also a cofounder, president, and instructor of EnableTech at UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Drew earned his BS and MS in mechanical engineering, taught as a lecturer on upper extremity prosthetics and orthotics, and served as a Design Fellow at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.

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