The Influence of Personal Experience and Identity on Design: Teaching Positionality to Engineers

Emily Lawson-Bulten; Samantha Lindgren; Ann-Perry Witmer

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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) - Best in DEED
Tagged Division: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48114

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Paper Authors

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Emily Lawson-Bulten University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Emily Lawson-Bulten is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a licensed civil engineer, she is concerned about equitable access to infrastructure, especially for WASH services in non-industrialized nations. Her research focuses on the influence of power dynamics between international NGOs, engineers, and their client communities on water system design. With a background in Contextual Engineering and International Development Studies, Emily utilizes participatory approaches to increase engineering awareness and community agency throughout the design process. Emily integrates feminist and anti-racist methodologies into the classroom as well, finding new ways to engage students' whole selves into engineering work.

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Samantha Lindgren University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Samantha Lindgren is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability Education in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is affiliated faculty in the Grainger College of Engineering in Agricultural and Biological Engineering and the Technology Entrepreneurship Center, and the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives program.

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Ann-Perry Witmer P.E. University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign orcid.org/0000-0001-7210-9572

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A teaching professor, researcher, lecturer, and professional civil engineer, Ann-Perry Witmer is the architect of the emerging discipline of Contextual Engineering, which merges technical design with societal understanding to improve adoption outcomes.

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Abstract

Human-centered engineering approaches, such as Contextual Engineering, acknowledge the importance of technical design in the sociocultural context, especially in situations where the societal problem is outside the engineer’s own sociocultural understanding. Yet little research examines how the designer’s social context impacts the design process. A keyword search of the literature using engineer(s/ing) and positionality within titles generates only 2 papers. Further, only Walji et al. describes their practical method for integrating concepts of the impact of social identity on design assumptions into the classroom. Within engineering, majority of research on positionality and other related concepts predominantly reside in the field of engineering education research. Similarly, the humanities and social sciences contain robust discussion in positionality, a rigorous approach for addressing how an individual's identity and life experience affect their perceptions and assumptions when building an understanding of subject populations. A gap in engineering design education literature exists, that which examines the integration of sociological concepts of identity and positionality into the curriculum. Here, we describe a classroom unit that could be incorporated into a multitude of design courses. Through this co-creative approach, students engage in a design activity to increase their understanding of positionality and recognize its place in technical design. Students (n=59) in the engineering course came from 9 engineering disciplines and 21 science and humanities majors, as the course generates interdisciplinary registration as a general education offering in the social sciences and non-Western societies. Within a lesson on social identity and positionality, students were asked to design their ‘perfect’ public restroom. As students completed designs, they were partnered and grouped to compare what design factors were considered and bathroom elements were included. Following the presentation of each group design to the class, students reflected on how their past experiences, values, and identities influenced their designs. After our in-class activity, 89.5% of students self-reported on a Likert scale that the activity increased their understanding of positionality a great deal or more. Out of the 57 responses to the anonymous survey, 100% of students reported that the activity increased their understanding of the impact of social identities on perception. This finding was triangulated through the inductive coding of students’ written social identity maps and positionality statements which were completed as a class assignment. These results demonstrate the success of our curriculum to expose students to the ways positionality inherently effects engineering design while affording students the opportunity to successfully apply these concepts. As engineering education works to become more just and inclusive, future practitioners must be taught awareness of their own positionality and given skills to mitigate its negative impacts on others within design.

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Lawson-Bulten, E., & Lindgren, S., & Witmer, A. (2024, June), The Influence of Personal Experience and Identity on Design: Teaching Positionality to Engineers Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48114

TY - CPAPER
AB - Human-centered engineering approaches, such as Contextual Engineering, acknowledge the importance of technical design in the sociocultural context, especially in situations where the societal problem is outside the engineer’s own sociocultural understanding. Yet little research examines how the designer’s social context impacts the design process. A keyword search of the literature using engineer(s/ing) and positionality within titles generates only 2 papers. Further, only Walji et al. describes their practical method for integrating concepts of the impact of social identity on design assumptions into the classroom. Within engineering, majority of research on positionality and other related concepts predominantly reside in the field of engineering education research. Similarly, the humanities and social sciences contain robust discussion in positionality, a rigorous approach for addressing how an individual&#39;s identity and life experience affect their perceptions and assumptions when building an understanding of subject populations. A gap in engineering design education literature exists, that which examines the integration of sociological concepts of identity and positionality into the curriculum. Here, we describe a classroom unit that could be incorporated into a multitude of design courses. Through this co-creative approach, students engage in a design activity to increase their understanding of positionality and recognize its place in technical design. Students (n=59) in the engineering course came from 9 engineering disciplines and 21 science and humanities majors, as the course generates interdisciplinary registration as a general education offering in the social sciences and non-Western societies. Within a lesson on social identity and positionality, students were asked to design their ‘perfect’ public restroom. As students completed designs, they were partnered and grouped to compare what design factors were considered and bathroom elements were included. Following the presentation of each group design to the class, students reflected on how their past experiences, values, and identities influenced their designs. After our in-class activity, 89.5% of students self-reported on a Likert scale that the activity increased their understanding of positionality a great deal or more. Out of the 57 responses to the anonymous survey, 100% of students reported that the activity increased their understanding of the impact of social identities on perception. This finding was triangulated through the inductive coding of students’ written social identity maps and positionality statements which were completed as a class assignment. These results demonstrate the success of our curriculum to expose students to the ways positionality inherently effects engineering design while affording students the opportunity to successfully apply these concepts. As engineering education works to become more just and inclusive, future practitioners must be taught awareness of their own positionality and given skills to mitigate its negative impacts on others within design.
AU - Emily Lawson-Bulten
AU - Samantha Lindgren
AU - Ann-Perry Witmer P.E.
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - The Influence of Personal Experience and Identity on Design: Teaching Positionality to Engineers
UR - https://peer.asee.org/48114
ER -