Sustainable product design: designing for diversity in engineering education

• Autores: Lora Oehlberg, Ryan Shelby, Alice Agogino
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 26, no. Extra 2, 2010, págs. 489-498
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Current and future engineers will need to address sustainability’s triple bottom line, simultaneously addressing financial, environmental,and social goals. There is also a need to improve diversity in engineering, both in the communities served by new technology and therepresentation of gender and ethnic minorities among engineering professionals. We present data gathered from ‘Engineering 10:Introduction to Engineering Design and Analysis’. This freshman course includes a six-week Mechanical Engineering module entitled‘Sustainable Human-Centered Design’, that covers both human-centered design techniques as well as the principles of sustainabledesign. We investigate these students’ experiences, confidence, and goals, focusing on aspects that might vary with gender and ethnicaffiliation. We suggest that enrollment diversity in engineering could be improved by teaching engineering in a manner that bothcomplements the previous engineering and design background of all students, as well as emphasizes the learning goals most important tounderrepresented engineering students. We also recommend offering sustainability and service learning projects that appeal to womenand ethnic minority students in order to pique their interest and encourage their pursuit of an engineering career.