The development of product archaeology as a platform for contextualizing engineering design

Our long-term objective is to institutionalize and sustain contextual engineering education through product archaeology. 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 developing a sustainable and scalable foundation to support novel approaches aimed at educating engineering students to understand the global, economic, environmental, and societal context and impact of engineering solutions. We present our vision for this contextual development and present some initial results from the network of institutions in our NSF TUES-funded project. 1. Contextual Engineering Education: A Problem and an Opportunity Engineers in the U.S. face tremendous challenges that include globalization of technical labor, economic turmoil, environmental resource limitations, and the increasingly blurred lines between the social and technical aspects of design. For over a decade, the NAE, NAS, NSF, and ABET have identified engineering education as a principal site for inculcating future engineers with new competencies to thrive in a globalized society. At the same time, they lamented about the “disconnect between the system of engineering education and the practice of engineering” that accelerating global challenges have only exacerbated [1]. Since 1996 the ABET Outcomes Assessment Criteria have offered a set of guidelines to assure that engineers are equipped to succeed and lead in this new world [2]. Among the most vital of these criteria is Outcome h: “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context”. Properly understood, Outcome h goes far beyond contextual awareness. It provides the bond between virtually all other ABET outcomes, linking the profession’s traditional strengths in scientific knowledge (Outcome a) with design (Outcomes b and c), multidisciplinary teamwork (Outcome d), and knowledge of contemporary issues (Outcome j). Outcome h is doubly important for engineering education because such global, economic, environmental, and societal issues have become critical for preparing, engaging, and retaining the nation’s best students [3-4]. Developing innovative strategies to teach effectively the skills necessary to understand GSEE context in engineering is not only a national need, but one of international significance. For instance, the UK is stressing engineering education to develop solutions to the “local, social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental context” [5], and China is training engineers to “adapt to changing economic conditions” and “create and explore the new global society” [6]. The work presented in this paper aims to help the U.S. keep up with related educational reforms around the world and re-establish its lead in effectively educating the world’s engineers. Despite its importance, engineering departments struggle to achieve Outcome h. For instance, at Trinity College, a first-year design course is used to assess every ABET outcome except Outcomes h and i [7]. At Purdue, involvement in extracurricular activities were used to assess each of the ABET outcomes; however, the authors were not able to make any conclusions for Outcome h, noting the need for “further analysis” of this outcome [8]. Briedis [9] notes that the assessment of Outcome h was “less straightforward” than the other professional outcomes, and a new course had to be developed to address this outcome directly. However, most departments do not have the flexibility or room to develop a new course specifically to address any single ABET outcome, much less Outcome h. In an already packed engineering curriculum, then, most departments ascribe the development of contextual expertise to an early cornerstone or later capstone design experience, or, alternatively, relegate the task to humanities and social science electives that rarely are integrated with the technical dimensions of design [10]. Consequently, 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. In an effort to address this significant educational gap, we have formalized a novel pedagogical framework called product archaeology [11] that transforms product dissection activities by prompting students to consider products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development. With an “archaeological mindset,” students approach product dissection with the task of evaluating and understanding a product’s (and its designers’) global, societal, economic and environmental context and impact. These hands-on, inductive learning activities require students to move beyond rote knowledge to hone their engineering judgment, analytical decision-making, and critical thinking. This pedagogical framework thus provides students with formal activities to think more broadly about their professional roles as engineers. 2. Product Archaeology Framework Product archaeology combines product dissection and cyberinfrastructure in novel ways to help integrate context—global, societal, economic, and environmental—into engineering courses [11]. Product dissection has a long and rich history of pedagogical innovation dating primarily back to Prof. Sheri Sheppard’s Mechanical Dissection course at Stanford [12-13]. Initial developments were in response to a general agreement by U.S. industry, engineering societies, and government that there had been a decline in the quality of undergraduate engineering education over the previous two decades [14-15]. The result was a strong push towards providing both intellectual and physical activities (such as dissection) to anchor the knowledge and practice of engineering in the minds of students [16-17]. Product dissection was successful in achieving this for several reasons. First, it helps couple engineering principles with significant visual feedback [18] and increase awareness of the design process [19]. Dissection also gives students early exposure to functional products and processes, and introducing such experiences early in the students’ academic careers has been shown to increase motivation and retention [20]. Such “learning by doing” activities encourage the development of curiosity, proficiency and manual dexterity, three desirable traits of an engineer [21]. Product dissection activities spread around the world as a community emerged around the development and propagation of these activities [17-18,20-26]. These activities have since evolved to all levels of undergraduate education (see Figure 1a) as they migrated from one university to the next. For instance, the power drill dissection activity used at Stanford [13] was adopted at Penn State [17] for sophomores and juniors, migrated to Virginia Tech for freshmen [27], and was recently adapted at Northwestern for use in a senior design course [28]. Unfortunately, most product dissection activities only emphasize the technical aspects of products (e.g., form, function, fabrication) [29]. While there are exceptions (e.g., dissection of single-use cameras to explore recycling and reuse [17]), most activities miss opportunities to explore the wide range of non-technical issues that can influence product development. As such, product dissection alone fails to provide “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context”. Product archaeology was born to address these shortcomings of product dissection. The term product archaeology was initially coined by Ulrich and Pearson [30] as the process of dissecting and analyzing a physical product to assess the design attributes that drive cost. Shooter and his colleagues advanced the archaeological aspects of dissection by combining excavation (literally “digging in the sand to find parts”) with a WebQuest they developed to enhance middle school students’ awareness of and competency in engineering [31]. More recently, we formally defined product archaeology as the process of reconstructing the lifecycle of a product—the customer requirements, design specifications, and manufacturing processes used to produce it—to understand the decisions that led to its development [11]. There is a module on product archaeology in a recent engineering textbook as well [32]. (a) Classifying dissection-based activities [33] (b) Mapping Kolb’s Model to Archaeology [11] Figure 1. Key Components of Our Product Archaeology Framework To create our product archaeology framework, we mapped Kolb’s four-stage learning model [34] to the four phases of archaeology [35]: (1) Preparation, (2) Excavation, (3) Evaluation, (4) Explanation, as shown in Figure 1b. The four keywords from Outcome h (i.e., global, societal, economic, environmental) are then used as triggers to develop questions pertaining to a specific product, usage, and impact using the template shown in Table 1. During the preparation phase, students reflect on what they know about the factors that impact the design of the particular product and postulate responses to questions about its design. The excavation activities lead to concrete experiences where students ca