2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The goal of this paper is to share a vision for enhancing sustainability pedagogy via a theory of ethnographic design awareness in engineering education. Ethnographic design awareness is way of knowing design that centers lived experience, the interconnectedness of social and natural systems and the participation of diverse perspectives in building a sustainable future. This paper describes the theoretical support and work in progress for our Engineering for One Planet (EOP) mini-grant. The objective of our mini-grant is to design an undergraduate course and assignment that integrates systems thinking, engineering ethics, design justice, and the EOP sustainability framework through the lens of ethnographic design. This assignment, and the course it is situated within, are co-designed by an anthropologist who directs several design initiatives in the school of engineering and an associate professor of systems engineering at the authors’ home institution. Our process includes implementation and evaluation of our assignment in the Spring Semester 2025. This paper reports our ethnographic design awareness framework and the structure of the course and assignment. By describing our theoretical support and preliminary results, we hope to promote a vision for expanding ethnographic design methods in sustainable engineering pedagogy. Our conceptualization of ethnographic design awareness draws on wide-ranging influences including autonomous design, design justice, and inclusive design to re-imagine the ways that students engage engineering design practice at multiple levels.