Investigating Complex Sociotechnical Problem Solving in Engineering: Assessments, Approaches, and Support Tools
Creators: name: Dugan, Kelley
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: complex problem
subject: engineering design
subject: engineering education
subject: sociotechnical
subject: systems thinking
subject: Mechanical Engineering
subject: FOS: Mechanical engineering
subject: Engineering

description: Engineers are tasked with increasingly complex problems. Complex engineering problems, and the systems in which they are embedded, are sociotechnical, meaning they require engineers to attend to social and technical dimensions as well as interactions among social and technical dimensions. A focus on the integration of social and technical dimensions in engineering problem solving is especially important given dominant ideologies in engineering culture that separate social considerations from engineering. Given that dominant engineering ideologies are reflected in engineering education and that insufficient attention to relevant social or technical dimensions risks failure and even harm, training is necessary to develop engineers’ abilities to navigate the complexity inherent to sociotechnical problem solving. My dissertation aims to further develop understanding of complex sociotechnical problem solving in engineering in order to provide foundational information for the further development of engineering assessments, training, and tools. Results from a systematic literature review of systems thinking assessments, as well as interviews on complex problem-solving approaches and perceptions of design process models, suggest social dimensions remain undervalued in engineering. These three studies demonstrated ways attention to breadth of social and technical dimensions was present or not across assessments, approaches, and support tools and how attention to breadth in assessments may connect to breadth in support tools and, in turn, breadth in problem-solving approaches. The systematic literature review of existing systems thinking assessments in engineering led to the identification of four assessment types. Behavior-based assessments were particularly important as reflected in the fact that they were the majority (19 of 27) of systems thinking assessments. However, this study demonstrated a lack of behavior-based assessments that explicitly valued attention to stakeholder and broad contextual factors, suggesting that the development of a more comprehensive behavior-based systems thinking assessment could be beneficial. In an interview study focused on concrete experiences, our team operationalized comprehensive systems thinking in order to analyze engineers complex problem-solving approaches. By attending to the presence of aspects and relationships we found attention to relationships was a key differentiator, with relationships that included contextual or temporal aspects being the most lacking in our sample of responses. The findings highlight that in preparing engineers to successfully address complex problems, education and training cannot be limited to individual social and technical dimensions, but must also emphasize attention to relationships among these dimensions. Interviews with undergraduate engineering design students focused on visual representations of three design process models suggested different process models make certain recommendations more salient than other models. Variation in participant perceptions was captured across five areas of design work. Participant perceptions of each of the three process models demonstrated the presence of a particular aspect of focus (economic, social, or technical) was most common in a single process model. Furthermore, most participants did not perceive the presence of a focus on environmental aspects nor note its absence for all three process models. This study highlights the power of models to facilitate attention to particular social and technical dimensions. Collectively, these research studies suggest that a conception of engineering as a purely technical pursuit persists, as demonstrated by the pervasive undervaluation of social dimensions relative to technical dimensions. Based on collective findings, I recommend coordinated development of increased attention to social dimensions (individually and in relationships) in engineering education and practice.