Communicating Effectively with a Range of Audiences: Audience Avatars in Engineering Design Education

Amit Shashikant Jariwala; Jill Fennell; Christian Sims

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) - Student-Centered Approaches in Design Education
Tagged Division: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48473

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Paper Authors

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Amit Shashikant Jariwala Georgia Institute of Technology orcid.org/0000-0002-3851-9161

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Dr. Amit Jariwala is the Director of Design & Innovation for the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He develops and maintains industry partnerships to support experiential, entrepreneurial, and innovative learning experiences within the academic curriculum of the school. He is a Woodruff School Teaching Fellow and strives to enhance education by developing classes, workshops, and events focused on implementing hands-on, collaborative learning through solving real-world problems. He directs the operations of the Institute-wide Georgia Tech Capstone Design Expo, which highlights projects created by over 2000 Georgia Tech seniors graduating students on an annual basis. He serves as the faculty advisor for the student organization of over 100 student volunteers who all train, staff, and manage the operations of Georgia Tech’s Flowers Invention Studio – one of the nation’s premier volunteer student-run makerspace, open to all of the Georgia Tech community.

Dr. Jariwala’s research interests are in the field of makerspaces, evidence-based design education, and advanced additive manufacturing process. During his Ph.D. studies, he was also a participant of the innovative TI:GER® program (funded by NSF:IGERT), which prepares students to commercialize high impact scientific research results. He has participated and led several research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the State of Georgia, and Industry sponsors. He currently directs a cross-disciplinary Vertically Integrated Project team on SMART^3 Makerspaces focused on research and development to enable the creation of intelligent systems to manage and maintain makerspaces.

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Jill Fennell Georgia Institute of Technology

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Jill Fennell, the Frank K. Webb Chair in Communication Skills at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, focuses on advancing written, visual, and verbal communication skills. Her research centers on affect theory and its application to technical communication, specifically information design. Jill studies how to enhance the effectiveness of pedagogical documents by incorporating principles from affect theory. Through her work, she aims to empower students, fostering an environment where they actively shape their communication interactions, including teamwork and ethical discussions. By integrating these principles, she goes beyond traditional methods, ensuring that students not only learn but also take an active role in shaping their communication experiences.

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Christian Sims Georgia Institute of Technology

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Abstract

Engineering Capstone Design courses offer immersive experiential learning opportunities, allowing students to step into the shoes of engineers. However, these courses can provide even more significant benefits by viewing them as immersive communication courses as well. Current literature focuses on using improv to introduce flexibility into engineering communication, incorporating communication into the engineering curriculum as a whole, and using avatars for communication education in general. However, a synthesis of these techniques is currently lacking, namely, using avatars for teaching immersive, multifaceted engineering communication in a capstone course. Such an approach can transform students into responsive, flexible, and adaptive communicators.

To facilitate this transformation, we propose a new academic practice/design intervention by introducing audience avatars in our engineering design capstone course. Our school defines effective communication as the maximization of appropriateness and responsiveness, aligning with ABET’s student outcome three, which demands adaptability to diverse audiences. This paper outlines the implementation of four audience avatars in the context of an engineering design capstone course: these avatars support students’ communication success by enabling deeper audience analysis and understanding of diverse audiences’ competing needs, communicator preconceptions, content expectations, technical understandings, and more. Throughout the course, students must practice communicating information about their projects to project sponsors, engineering professionals, Expo judges, as well as the general public. This requirement forces students to understand a range of audiences to communicate appropriately; that these audiences revolve and rotate throughout the semester forces students to practice responsiveness.

Becoming appropriate and responsive technical communicators is incredibly challenging, and the audience avatars exist to assist students through this challenge. We created four avatars; one for each category of audience students are asked to address. The avatars do not analyze the audiences for the students, but instead are designed to make the audience more “real”; enabling students to practice audience analysis with a fleshed-out representation, instead of some phantom that they cannot grapple with. These avatars allow students to ascertain audience preferences, anxieties, etc., and practice making appropriate communication decisions. By supporting students through avatars, we can help them make better and more effective communication choices. Through multiple avatars, for singular information being communicated, we teach them to be flexible and responsive communicators.

This is a WIP paper with curricular interventions currently ongoing in Fall 2023 and planned for Spring 2024 semester. The preliminary impact of the proposed approach is planned to be evaluated using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, which could include, pre and post-surveys, interviews with students, faculty, sponsors, and expo judges, as well as scores provided by expo judges. These results will help educators assess the benefits of the approach and develop a framework to integrate effective communication teaching and practice skills within the curriculum for engineering design courses.

Citation
Format

Jariwala, A. S., & Fennell, J., & Sims, C. (2024, June), Communicating Effectively with a Range of Audiences: Audience Avatars in Engineering Design Education Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48473

TY - CPAPER
AB - Engineering Capstone Design courses offer immersive experiential learning opportunities, allowing students to step into the shoes of engineers. However, these courses can provide even more significant benefits by viewing them as immersive communication courses as well. Current literature focuses on using improv to introduce flexibility into engineering communication, incorporating communication into the engineering curriculum as a whole, and using avatars for communication education in general. However, a synthesis of these techniques is currently lacking, namely, using avatars for teaching immersive, multifaceted engineering communication in a capstone course. Such an approach can transform students into responsive, flexible, and adaptive communicators.

To facilitate this transformation, we propose a new academic practice/design intervention by introducing audience avatars in our engineering design capstone course. Our school defines effective communication as the maximization of appropriateness and responsiveness, aligning with ABET’s student outcome three, which demands adaptability to diverse audiences. This paper outlines the implementation of four audience avatars in the context of an engineering design capstone course: these avatars support students’ communication success by enabling deeper audience analysis and understanding of diverse audiences’ competing needs, communicator preconceptions, content expectations, technical understandings, and more. Throughout the course, students must practice communicating information about their projects to project sponsors, engineering professionals, Expo judges, as well as the general public. This requirement forces students to understand a range of audiences to communicate appropriately; that these audiences revolve and rotate throughout the semester forces students to practice responsiveness.

Becoming appropriate and responsive technical communicators is incredibly challenging, and the audience avatars exist to assist students through this challenge. We created four avatars; one for each category of audience students are asked to address. The avatars do not analyze the audiences for the students, but instead are designed to make the audience more “real”; enabling students to practice audience analysis with a fleshed-out representation, instead of some phantom that they cannot grapple with. These avatars allow students to ascertain audience preferences, anxieties, etc., and practice making appropriate communication decisions. By supporting students through avatars, we can help them make better and more effective communication choices. Through multiple avatars, for singular information being communicated, we teach them to be flexible and responsive communicators.

This is a WIP paper with curricular interventions currently ongoing in Fall 2023 and planned for Spring 2024 semester. The preliminary impact of the proposed approach is planned to be evaluated using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, which could include, pre and post-surveys, interviews with students, faculty, sponsors, and expo judges, as well as scores provided by expo judges. These results will help educators assess the benefits of the approach and develop a framework to integrate effective communication teaching and practice skills within the curriculum for engineering design courses.
AU - Amit Shashikant Jariwala
AU - Jill Fennell
AU - Christian Sims
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Communicating Effectively with a Range of Audiences: Audience Avatars in Engineering Design Education
UR - https://peer.asee.org/48473
ER -