2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The language of engineering is replete with ‘unintended consequences’ as amply illustrated across a number of examples, ranging from the mundane to grave –left-handed individuals struggle with most appliances (scissors, vacuum cleaners, can-openers); car crash fatality rates for women are higher than for men because crash-test dummies (until 2022) were modeled on male bodies; facial-recognition technologies frequently misidentify Black individuals; soap dispensers fail to operate for dark-skinned people (only recognizing light skin tones); the health effects of radiation are characterized for ‘reference man’ (170 cm tall, 20-30-year-old Caucasian male, weighing 70kg). Engineer-designers, implicitly or explicitly, assume a ‘reference man’. Most of us are not reference man, and if ever, will only be reference man for a brief period in our lives. In this way, we engineers effectively design technologies that serve but a few well and poorly serve others, if at all.

The problem becomes even thornier for complex sociotechnical systems –including most energy technologies, especially nuclear. These systems have few ‘users’ in the traditional sense (operated by a handful) but impact many – during normal operation and failure. Instead, these systems have stakeholders, or better put, ‘rightsholders’ – individuals impacted by the development and use of these systems but seldom having say in any stage of design. Breaking from this traditional approach to design that fails to incorporate rightsholders in the technology design and development process, we have developed a new course “ Socially Engaged Design of Nuclear Energy Technologies” for first-year undergraduate students at the University of Michigan. In this paper, we describe the pedagogical philosophy underlying the course and the lessons learned from its first offering in the Fall of 2023. Notably, all sections of this course operate under a design-build-test model and feature, lecture, lab, and discussion sections.

Through the course, students examine positionality, power, and language in the context of socially engaged design. Course assignments and lectures present ethics and engineering work as necessarily intertwined. For example, students learned the fundamentals of nuclear science and engineering alongside qualitative research methods and completed a community engagement workshop. Assigned readings and videos offer opportunities to reflect on user-centered design, the relationship between politics and technology, and the ethics of nuclear weapons development. Virtual reality technologies were used to learn nuclear reactor design and facilitate the community engagement experience.