Incorporating Contextual Factors Into Engineering Design Processes: An Analysis of Novice Practice

Abstract

Incorporation of contextual factors into design decisions is important for successful engineering design outcomes. Through document analysis and semi-structured interviews, we investigated the types of contextual factors incorporated by novice engineering designers and their approaches during capstone design projects. Our findings demonstrated that novices primarily considered technical and institutional contextual factors across all design stages, informed largely by contextual observations and interviews with stakeholders; sociopolitical contextual factors were less frequently considered. A broader set of contextual factors were incorporated into design decisions for projects set within unfamiliar contexts. Contextual factors that could be easily quantified were more readily applied to design decisions. We suggest that there is room for more intentional approaches to incorporate contextual factors iteratively throughout design processes.

Thinking Beyond the Device: An Overview of Human- and Equity-Centered Approaches for Health Technology Design

“…From accelerating the development and evaluation of vaccines and rapid diagnostic tests to catalyzing a cultural shift in healthcare delivery with broadened access through self-testing and telehealth, COVID-era innovation is relevant and needed, and it can be leveraged for other health conditions. Unfortunately, COVID has also magnified the persistent social and contextual inequities that lead to barriers to access and use of health innovations (18) and has further emphasized that in health and medicine, technological innovation alone is inadequate without incorporation of social, political, and cultural contextual considerations (19)(20)(21). In response, there has been increased emphasis on the engagement of communities and diverse stakeholders to understand and address the multilevel challenges to the design, implementation, adoption, and diffusion of health technologies (22).…”

Charting a Research Direction to Explore Development of Sociotechnical Thinking in Engineering Design

“…Their work has examined how novice engineering design students engage with and consider contextual factors throughout the design process. They note how novice engineers tend to emphasize technical factors and distance themselves from social considerations [18], [19]. This work is informative in that it helps us better understand novice-like thinking and behaviors related to sociotechnical aspects of design and recognize where engineers might struggle or experience challenges (e.g., in incorporating social factors into the design).…”

“…Research in this direction could leverage existing dimensions of sociotechnical thinking research or contextual factors described (e.g., [8], [9], [17], [19]] to explore different ways of thinking and reasoning about these various domains. Researchers could develop design activities that can generate sociotechnical discussions and explore differences across groups of engineering students and professionals with different levels of experience.…”

Supporting Engineering Students’ Incorporation of “Context” into Global Health Design Processes

“…This analysis included data collected from two prior studies that investigated (1) engineering student practice in the context of a final-year undergraduate capstone design course [20] and (2) professional engineering practice in global health [19]. From the study of engineering student practice, we selected the subset of the total sample (six student teams out of twenty) that worked on global health-themed projects and participated in semi-structured interviews with our research team.…”

“…To fill gaps in student learning outcomes related to making informed judgments based on the broader context and incorporate contextual factors during engineering design practice, our prior work has investigated which contextual factors professional and student engineering designers consider and how they incorporate contextual factors into their global health design processes [19], [20]. Here, we extended this prior research to compare the design behavior of students and professional global health engineering designers to propose key learning outcomes related to acquiring knowledge and skills related to incorporating contextual factors into design processes and present a preliminary framework for use in capstone engineering design courses.…”