2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education has faced enduring criticism for being overly focused on the narrowly technical dimensions of engineering practice, ill preparing engineering graduates for their future work. “Sociotechnical” approaches to engineering education have arisen as one category of responses to this perceived narrowness. This paper reviews our efforts to situate sociotechnical integration as the foundation of our new undergraduate design engineering undergraduate degree program, focusing on how we have cast this foundation in both our program’s curriculum and through our ABET assessment protocol design and implementation. The paper first reviews some of the scholarship on sociotechnical integration, including justifications for expanding engineering education’s focus beyond technical competencies and identification of a framework for thinking about different conceptions of the relationships between social and technical dimensions of engineering practice. It then provides an overview and justification of our Design Engineering program’s curricular structure, built around a “design spine.” Next, the paper considers the design of our program’s ABET assessment infrastructure and how we have used ABET requirements to ensure we hold ourselves accountable to a high-bar of sociotechnical integration throughout our program, with a particular focus on how we operationalize ABET student outcomes via our program’s targeted performance indicators.