The Assessment of Product Archaeology as a Platform for Contextualizing Engineering Design

Abstract

Many engineering departments struggle to meet “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” (Outcome h) that is required for ABET. As a result, engineering students receive meaningful contextual experiences in piecemeal fashion and graduate with a lack of concrete competencies that bridge knowledge and practice in the global world in which they will live and work. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, our product archaeology framework combines concepts from archaeology with advances in cyber-enhanced product dissection to implement pedagogical innovations that address the significant educational gap. In this paper, we focus on assessing elements of a sustainable and scalable foundation that can support novel approaches aimed at educating engineering students to understand the global, economic, environmental, and societal context and impact of engineering solutions. This foundation is being developed across a network of partner institutions. We present recent results from freshman, sophomore, and senior courses at two of the partners in the national network of institutions.

Critical Pedagogies and First-year Engineering Students' Conceptions of 'What it Means to be an Engineer'

“…Given the goals of the program and the opportunity for curricular innovation within STEP, we developed a 5-week project-based learning course rooted in product archaeology. Product archaeology is a teaching framework that expands on traditional product dissection approaches and provides a space for students to explore the broader impacts of engineering design (Kemper Lewis et al, 2013). In addition to taking apart a product and examining its functions, product archaeology also provides spaces for students to explore the global, societal, economic, and environmental impacts of a particular product design.…”

Designettes: An Approach to Multidisciplinary Engineering Design Education

“…Techniques, such as product dissection, are being introduced in universities as state-of-the-art [42,43]. Additionally, dedicated capstone and cornerstone design courses remain the primary modes of design education [43,44] and designettes offer opportunities to expand upon these advances. The examples in this section provide inspiration for the development of the designettes framework (Sec.…”

Contextual Constraining of Student Design Practices

“…Studies in engineering education have identified and investigated several local educational contextual factors affecting design. The structure of the project (Moore, Diefes-Dux, & Imbrie, 2005), external support from faculty or clients, content knowledge, and the team context can influence student engineering design (Lewis et al, 2014;Carberry, Lee, & Ohland, 2010). Although these studies have looked at various factors, they have not attempted to look comprehensively at how the students' context constrains their design practices and what, within their context, are the salient, or important, factors that shape their designs.…”