2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Enginovation: A Social Experiment in Innovating Together

Presented at Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES) Technical Session 9: Collaboration and Community

Sociotechnical innovation is wildly evident in the world around us from smart phones to workplace collaboration tools to electric cars. Yet, the fusion of the technical and social are often regarded as disparate entities where one of these constructs is often considered too late in the process often resulting in ramifications for the greater public. As an example, the purchase and use of electric cars has been incentivized by the government, providing tax breaks to citizens who purchase them in the goal of reducing our carbon footprint. However, the social ramifications of the supporting infrastructure’s capacity to produce an equitable distribution of efficient and reliable charging stations is less understood. In our lab, we desired to embark on a tiered mentoring research project at the intersection of engineering, technology, equity, justice and love, where engineering students across various identities, disciplines and statuses came together to investigate the shortcomings of innovation. Specifically, the goal of this effort would be to catalogue failed innovations over time in the form of a sociotechnical systems failure analysis to uncover the deeper connections to cultural beliefs, values, and norms. To go about this, the doctoral students in my lab and I wished to recruit a team of undergraduate engineers to join us in this work, and this is where the experiment began. We realized that we wanted to identify undergraduate engineers who were open to dissolving the imaginary boundaries of the social and technical to truly center the responsibility of engineering to people, society and the planet. Our experiment details the process by which we came to identify this team of engineers and our work in progress highlights that which we have since been able to explore and learn together. This work is novel in that the graduate students have led this process of identifying their cadre of innovators. The process of selecting the undergraduate students involved a first round of critical essay responses, a second round of interviewing with the team, and the establishment of rubrics at each step to prioritize that which was important in identifying the team to join in the work. This process has pushed the graduate students to weigh the values and questions that mattered most and to be able to recognize when these ideals were expressed in the applicants. Through this process, the team identified five undergraduate students to join our team in a quest for deeper sociotechnical understanding. We believe this work has created a beautiful, student driven process of identifying engineers that together innovate innovation in a way that can be translated and/or modeled to other contexts.

Authors

Dr. Brooke Charae Coley Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus [biography]

Dr. Brooke Coley, Assistant Professor of Engineering at Arizona State University, is a trailblazing scholar and disruptor, redefining engineering through equity-driven innovation. As the Founding Executive Director of RARE JUSTICE, she spearheads transformative efforts to dismantle systemic barriers, eradicate anti-Blackness in STEM, and amplify the voices of racially minoritized scholars. Her groundbreaking research critically examines graduate education while demanding accountability for the lived experiences of minoritized individuals, harnessing immersive virtual reality to expose systemic inequities and drive institutional change. With a relentless commitment to justice, she integrates mental health and wellness into academic spaces, challenging harmful norms that hinder true inclusion. A thought leader employing critical qualitative and arts-based methodologies, she has secured millions in NSF funding since 2017 to fuel her revolutionary work. Dr. Coley’s visionary leadership has earned her top accolades, including the 2024 William Elgin Wickenden and Betty Vetter Awards and a 2023 ARC Network Virtual Visiting Scholar appointment. Rooted in her lived experience as a minoritized scholar with a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh, she remains unapologetic in her mission to hold institutions accountable, drive systemic transformation, and build a future where all in STEM can thrive.
Diego Reyes [biography]

I am a PhD Student in the Engineering Education Systems and Design Program at Arizona State Unviersity. I come from a Biomedical engineering background and have a large passion for dismantling barriers to higher education to make it more accessible.
Abimelec Mercado Rivera http://orcid.org/https:// 0000-0002-8899-7671 Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus [biography]

Abimelec Mercado Rivera is a Puerto Rican doctoral student and graduate research assistant in the Engineering Education Systems and Design program at Arizona State University. Abimelec received his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM) in 2016. After working in the aerospace industry, he returned to the UPRM for his MS in Mechanical Engineering in 2017, where he pursued ways to tailor ideation methods to interdisciplinary teams as part of his thesis work, and had the opportunity to teach undergraduate ME courses. His previous efforts and experiences in engineering education helped shape his overall goal of fostering human-centered education systems, which led him to pursue his PhD at ASU.
Mrs. Jennifer Hadley Perkins http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1730-8306 Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus [biography]

Hadley Perkins is a third-year Ph.D. Student in the Engineering Education Systems & Design Program at Arizona State University. Her research interests include Graduate Students’ Teaching Formation, Faculty Development & Mentorship, Curriculum Design, and Virtual instruction. She earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1997. She attended Wichita State University for graduate study, earning a Secondary Mathematics Teaching Certification in 2008 and an MS in Mechanical Engineering in 2018. Ms. Perkins is a former Assistant Engineering Educator in the Engineering Technology Department of Wichita State University. She has also taught Secondary Mathematics courses in both public and private school settings.
Joshua Owusu Ansah Arizona State University
Precious Njeck Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus
Esther Low Arizona State University [biography]

Esther Low is a third-year undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Global Health at Arizona State University. With a strong academic foundation and a passion for healthcare innovation, she is committed to advancing women’s health through research and technology. Her current work includes point-of-care microfluidic devices, immunology with an emphasis on HLA class I molecules, and health literacy. As a research assistant, Esther integrates engineering and public health approaches to develop accessible medical solutions and promote informed patient care.
Crislana Rafael Arizona State University
Bilal Ahmad Arizona State University

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

« View session