2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar argues that the act of designing involves “much more than the creation of objects”; it also produces “diverse forms of life and, often, contrasting notions of sociability and the world” (2019: 3). To incorporate this perspective into undergraduate engineering design education, we developed an assignment that guides students in applying the theoretical concept of “sociability” to learn about collaborative housing design. Drawing on over three years of ongoing fieldwork in Alaska, this paper describes our pedagogy and a case study exploring contrasting forms of sociability that emerged in a community building project inspired by Indigenous home design methods.

We address three research questions: 1) What alternative frameworks for addressing the complexity of building in this region can be applied in collaborative housing design projects? 2) How can a case study on participatory design methods in one community provide critical insights for addressing regional housing issues more broadly? and 3) How can the need for alternative frameworks be taught and integrated into engineering education?

Our case study focuses on three housing prototypes designed to address housing inequality in remote Alaska Native communities. These prototypes illustrate the role of boundary objects in addressing the challenges of building homes in areas unconnected to road systems, reliant on barge and air transport, and facing extreme winter conditions, high fuel costs, and limited land availability. This context often leads to discourses of “vulnerability” in housing design, which, as anthropologists Elizabeth Marino and A.J. Faas argue, perpetuate misunderstandings of the local histories and resilience that have shaped Indigenous approaches to housing in this region for thousands of years (2020).

Through our ethnographic study, we are co-creating a body of analyses on building projects in this region that examines both the technical and social decision-making processes of local actors. Additionally, we are developing curricular approaches that guide students and design participants in comparing, mapping, and reflecting on the relationships between these projects, with a focus on collaborative design and the incorporation of alternative perspectives. Our curriculum enables students to explore approaches for developing housing that account for the diverse networks involved in this complex work.