Design for Standardization: 

Standards Education from the Classroom to Everyday Practice 

PI: Prof. Andrew L. Russell 

Co-PI: Prof. Lee Vinsel 

Date: March 18, 2016 

Summary paper as part of project report for Design for Standardization, a 2-year project 

funded by an award to Stevens Institute of Technology through Standards Services 

Curricula Development Cooperative Agreement Program (2013-NIST-SSCD-01). 

Identified need and original project goals 

The problem that our project identified was that undergraduate students at our 

university—primarily an engineering-focused institution—were not introduced to 

standards or the standardization process in a comprehensive or holistic manner. Students 

would encounter standards in technical courses, but had no robust framework for 

understanding social significance of standards, processes for their development, their 

immense strategic importance, or opportunities for getting involved as a career. Our 

project, Design for Standardization, started with the realization that opportunities existed 

to introduce students to standards in the context of an elective course that they could take 

to fulfill a humanities requirement. As a result, we structured the project to develop 

curricular materials that we could use at Stevens and share with other university faculty. 

Our project title, “Design for Standardization,” indicated our project’s two major goals: 

- To teach students about the complexities of standards and standardization that 

they will need to master if they want to design successful technologies; 

- To encourage students to take part in the standards-setting process as a significant 

and rewarding component of their professional careers. 

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Our concept of “Design for Standardization” takes its inspiration from the “Values in 

Design” (or “Design for Values”) approach, pioneered by Helen Nissenbaum at NYU and 

Batya Friedman at the University of Washington. This approach, developed over the past 

decade through research, publications, and teaching materials, provides designers and 

engineers with new theories and methods for expressing societal values in technological 

designs. Because we are following this type of holistic approach—one that conceives of 

standards and standardization as a broad and far-reaching set of social and technical 

activities—we believe that our proposal was well positioned to advance NIST’s goals to 

integrate standards and standardization information into existing curricula at the 

undergraduate and graduate levels, and to strengthen education and learning about 

standards and standardization. 

Our proposal also stated four more specific project goals: 

1. The creation of an undergraduate course on “Standards and Society.” 

2. The creation of content modules that can be adopted and adapted by instructors— 

both at Stevens and at other educational institutions—who teach subjects such as 

science, engineering, and business at the undergraduate and graduate levels. 

3. Collaboration with groups that are already working to integrate standards into 

educational curricula. 

4. The public dissemination of our teaching materials and the “Design for 

Standardization” approach, via conference presentations and journal publications. 

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We believe that we have achieved goals 1, 3, and 4—in fact, we succeeded 

beyond our expectations, as described below. We did not achieve goal 2. Our initial 

proposal and significant amount of effort went towards the goal of the creation of content 

modules. We planned to develop and implement those modules in the “Design Spine,” a 

series of design-focused classes offered for undergraduate engineering majors at Stevens. 

Our efforts to create customized modules for different departments—including Electrical 

and Computer Engineering and Systems Engineering—were at first met with enthusiasm. 

But, over time, the enthusiasm waned and faculty in other departments were less 

receptive to the types of curricular materials we proposed: we offered multimedia content 

modules in combination with simulation games, but we heard in response that a simple 

online quiz was all that was desired. In one other case, a key collaborator left Stevens, 

thus cutting us off from an opportunity in a different department. 

Nevertheless, we believe that the creation of content modules was not the most 

important curricular innovation we could provide. Once we learned more about the 

existing content modules and other available resources for standards education that had 

been created by other NIST awardees, as well as by institutions such as ASTM, IEEE, 

ANSI, ISO, ICES, and others, we decided that our own creation of content modules (goal 

2) was relatively unimportant compared to the other goals. We focused instead on 

gaining and disseminating our experience with the implementation of case studies and 

best practices with different groups of students. 

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The curricular innovation: development, evaluation, and findings. 

The major innovation from our project was the creation and delivery of a new 

undergraduate course. 

In the fall 2014 semester, the PIs (Russell and Vinsel) team-taught an 

undergraduate seminar, Standardization and Society (HST 380), offered through the 

Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the College of Arts & Letters at 

Stevens. Like most STS programs, the Stevens STS program offers courses that examine 

science and technology from the vantage points of the humanities and social sciences. 

HST 380 is an advanced (junior/senior) course that is open to students of any major and 

counts toward the advanced Humanities requirements for all majors at Stevens. The 

course met in 2.5-hour sessions, once a week. Most of the 19 students enrolled in the 

class were engineering majors, with a minority who major in STS, the arts, or business. 

The course description reads as follows: “HST 380 provides an interdisciplinary 

overview of the place of standardization in modern societies. Students will explore how 

standards play important roles in shaping our lives as consumers and citizens, as well as 

how they might participate in the development and use of standards in technical and 

social fields.” 

In the first session of the semester, students were thrust immediately into a 

standards simulation game, where they adopted the roles of different stakeholders in a 

standards-setting process. The game sparked their thinking about some fundamental 

questions, such as: Who decides to make something standard? How are standards 

enforced? What can I do if I don’t like a standard? Through their participation in the 

game, students immediately understood that standards are not lifeless abstractions; they 

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are conventions and agreements that are made, revised, and sometimes abandoned. In 

addition to the strategic intrigue that simulations provide, they also help to advance some 

primary goals of humanities education: for students to hone interpersonal skills of 

speaking, listening, reasoning, and thinking critically; and for students to develop their 

capacity for empathy and appreciation for a diversity of perspectives and interests. 

In subsequent class sessions, students in HST 380 explored the past, present, and 

future of standards-setting regimes in industrial, governmental, and international arenas. 

To reach students with a variety of learning styles, course assignments and activities also 

featured guest lectures, academic books and articles, videos, student blogs on 

standardization in everyday life, and further simulation games. Students dove into 

subjects such as automobile safety standards and regulations; computer “standards wars”; 

and other standards that they discovered and investigated through group assignments and 

presentations. By learning about standards for health, aging, and life insurance, they 

were able to reflect on the human aspects—and human costs—of regimes of 

standardization that facilitate human differentiation and discrimination. 

The course syllabus is available from http://arussell.org/papers/HST380.pdf. We 

have not tracked how many people have accessed this syllabus, or if they have sought to 

use it to inform their own course development. In the fall 2014 semester, course 

textbooks were Andrew L. Russell, Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, 

Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Martha Lampland and 

Susan Leigh Star, eds., Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and 

Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Cornell University Press, 2008). 

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The course concluded with a twist on those familiar end-of-semester rituals: 

course evaluations and student grades. Everyone in education has experienced how 

deeply the logic of standardization pervades it—from grades and curriculum 

requirements to ABET accreditation and US News and Report rankings. Our institutional 

mandate to conform to a system of evaluation as part of a broader regime of accreditation 

provides compelling material for revisiting the questions from the first class of the 

semester: Who decides to make something standard? How are standards enforced? What 

can I do if I don’t like a standard? 

HST 380 thus was an interactive and exciting course, deeply engaged with 

matters of science and technology, and focused on bringing standards to the front and 

center of classroom discussions and student research projects. We plan to teach the 

course again soon, and are keen to explore opportunities to bring our students into 

collaboration with peers from other universities and with standards professionals working 

in government, industry, and NGOs. Located in Hoboken, New Jersey, we are fortunate 

to be in close proximity to a rich supply of potential guest speakers, both from the 

Stevens faculty as well as professionals who work in the New York City area. A guest 

lecture from ANSI’s Lisa Rajchel was a highlight for many students in the fall 2014 

semester. 

Student response to the course was overwhelmingly positive. Of the 13 students 

who responded to assessment questionnaires, 100% reported that the course increased 

their “awareness of the ethical responsibility and societal impact of [their] future 

profession,” that they learned “how standards are created, negotiated, and implemented,” 

that they became “conversant with the strategic and professional aspects of 

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standardization,” and that they could “now identify the great variety of roles that 

standards play in cultural, political, and economic aspects of daily life.” In their 

anonymous comments, students wrote that the course was “eye opening” and that it was 

“a vital class that should be required for all engineering and science students.” One 

student wrote, “I really enjoyed the various in-class discussions. The course provided 

insight into an aspect of science and technology that I wasn’t aware of.” The student 

continued, “As an engineer, I feel I learned valuable knowledge about the standardization 

process for scientific fields.” Another student wrote, “I knew standards were important, 

but I had never considered how much power they actually had.” 

In summary, we designed HST 380 to reach a diverse group of students who 

otherwise would not have encountered standards in a critical and rigorous manner. We 

were especially pleased to see how student work combined technical and humanistic 

aspects of standardization. We presented the results of this work at the ICES conference 

in Ottawa in August 2014, as well as at NIST workshops in 2014 and 2015. We also 

presented some aspects of our research related to “Design for Standardization” to the 

annual meeting of the Business History Conference, March 13-15 in Frankfurt, Germany, 

where we appeared on a panel titled “Standardization and its Discontents.” Our work 

appears in the open scientific literature in IEEE Standards Education e-Magazine 

(Volume 4, No. 2, December 2014) and in Standards Engineering: The Journal of the 

Standards Engineering Society (May/June 2015). 

Beyond the rewards that came with course offering as planned, the experience of 

teaching the course—and developing it within the community of educators nurtured by 

NIST’s curriculum development program—created many unanticipated benefits: 

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- Incorporation of standards education materials into the Stevens Summer Program 

for high school students during the summer 2014 and 2015 sessions; 

- Meaningful collaboration with IEEE Standards Association, including 

publications in IEEE-SA web and print materials; Russell’s participation in the 

IEEE Standards University; and Russell’s well-received lecture on the history of 

standards at the December 2015 meeting of the IEEE SA Board of Governors; 

- Student submissions to the ANSI student paper competition in 2015. We were 

delighted to learn that one of our students, Shane Quinlan Arlington, was awarded 

first place in the competition. Arlington and Vinsel traveled to Washington DC in 

the fall of 2015 to accept the award; 

- Significant collaboration with other individuals and institutions in standards 

education, including: 

o ANSI Committee on Education (Russell and Vinsel are now members); 

o United Knowledge (UK provided simulation exercises for our course, and 

Vinsel has worked as a moderator for UK exercises outside of Stevens 

over the past year); 

o Drexel University (Vinsel was a guest speaker at Drexel’s NIST-funded 

summer 2015 workshop for graduate students, and we are in regular 

contact with Profs. Amy Slaton and Scott Knowles about future 

collaborations that might include another application for NIST’s support); 

o The Maintainers, a conference to be held at Stevens on April 7-9, 2016. 

This conference will host over 40 speakers who responded to a call for 

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papers on the subject of maintenance, standardization, repair, and other 

aspects of labor in infrastructural or other technological systems. 

We attribute the success of all of these initiatives directly to the support that NIST 

provided for this project. We believe it is fair to conclude that the impact of NIST’s 

funding far outpaced our expectations, and will continue to be a catalyst for collaboration 

well beyond the term of the funding. 

Lessons learned through the activity and suitability for adoption in other 

educational organizations, communities, or fields of practice. 

We see five lessons that are particularly important to highlight, particularly for 

professionals who seek to learn from our experience or who will adopt or adapt the 

materials we produced. 

1. Classroom discussions are most effective when student interest is engaged on a 

personal level. 

Standards education has long suffered under the label of being “boring” or too 

heavily laden with acronyms. The best way to overcome these problems is to 

replace abstract concepts and examples with examples that matter more to 

students: education, sports, entertainment, personal electronics, and so on. 

2. Simulation games are very effective teaching tools. 

In our experience, the most significant leaps in student understanding and student 

engagement came through simulation exercises. We note that colleagues in other 

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fields—including history, anthropology, and political science—also have been 

utilizing simulation games in their teaching, and are equally impressed with the 

results. 

3. Local conditions are decisive. 

We observed that educational materials that work well at one university or for one 

instructor may not necessarily work well in another setting. This observation, if 

accurate, is at odds with efforts to create materials that “scale” efficiently. Perhaps 

one factor at play here is the level of tacit knowledge embedded in course 

materials that is difficult to transfer along with the materials themselves. 

4. It is a risk to propose curricular innovations that are under another department’s 

control. 

We were enthusiastic about the prospect of creating content modules that our 

colleagues in engineering could adopt for their own “Design Spine” courses. 

Unfortunately, we encountered difficulties finding collaborators who would 

implement the modules we proposed. The lesson here is that it is a risk to 

propose curricular innovations that are under another department’s control. We 

think this risk would be worth taking again, but the safer path is to develop 

courses and materials that one can control more directly, as we did with HST 380. 

5. High quality videos would be helpful. 

Existing course materials are primarily in the form of readings, lecture notes and 

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slides, and exercises. These can be effective (with the caveat of #3 above), but we 

believe that an additional type of instructional material—namely, high quality 

videos—would be even more effective. We do not have any concrete suggestions 

for such videos, beyond the conclusion stated above, that any videos should seek 

to present material in a way that is first and foremost engaging for students. 

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