Engineering design thinking unpacks problems of diversity and inclusion
What if engineering design thinking could be used to address a persistent, multidimensional challenge entangled by social, societal, environmental, and cultural factors?
That’s what researchers at Purdue University are investigating in a three-year study with $300K funding from the Professional Formation of Engineers initiative of the National Science Foundation. While design thinking is a well-established process used by engineers to design products and systems, using the approach to address highly complex and, in many respects, more ambiguous issues is comparatively new. With this national-level support the researchers aim to uncover and address the systemic barriers of diversity and inclusion in engineering.
The research study is a component of the Weldon School’s three-pronged initiative to study and address underlying paradigms in the professional formation of engineers and the lack of diversity and inclusion in biomedical engineering. Through strategic planning, research, and outreach initiatives the School seeks to effect local programmatic change at Purdue as well as provide meaningful data to support similar efforts at a national level.
No time like the present
Multiple factors have converged to give rise to the relevance of this study and the radical shifts in thinking about this issue.
While Purdue has a strong and nationally recognized Minority Engineering Program (MEP) to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation of minorities in engineering, and this mission remains a focus across the university today, biomedical engineering at Purdue remains challenged at increasing diversity in students, staff, and faculty. This challenge exists at the national level as well.
In 2016, the Weldon School sponsored the Celebration of Minorities in Biomedical Engineering luncheon at the national conference of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and conducted a survey there to gain a broader understanding of the underlying challenges. The keynote speakers were the current executive director of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE – founded at Purdue in 1975) and the former president of NSBE (a Weldon School alumnus and current Associate Director of MEP).
In 2017, the Weldon School conducted engineering design workshops as outreach events for underrepresented minority high school students at two locations: a boarding school, Janakalyan Nivasi Vidyalaya, in Harangul district of Maharashtra, India and a summer STEM program at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, Colorado.
Informed by these experiences, the faculty and staff of the Weldon School re-invigorated their commitment to recruiting and supporting a more diverse student body by writing specific goals, metrics, and milestones into the new five-year strategic plan (2017-2022).
Concurrently in 2017, NSBE and BMES forged an historic partnership when the organizations signed a three-year agreement designed to support their mutual goals with regard to increasing diversity in engineering.
Thus the sustained university and school commitments and national level initiatives make this an ideal time and place to spur a deep transformation toward increasing diversity and inclusion in biomedical engineering.
In this story, we spotlight the research component of this initiative.
Weldon School launches NSF-funded study
The NSF-funded research project at Purdue is exploring design thinking as a way to study issues that have been identified as systemic barriers in the formation of professional engineers, including the lack of diversity and inclusion in many engineering programs.
It’s a relatively novel approach to a complex, dynamic problem that has resisted resolution.
“We’re engineers; we’re good at using design thinking as a process to solve complex problems,” said Carla Zoltowski, principal investigator of the study and assistant professor of engineering practice in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Why not leverage what we know to try to solve this problem?”
Zoltowski is collaborating with Andrew Brightman, associate professor of engineering practice and assistant head of the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, and with Patrice Buzzannell, chair and professor of the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, on the project.
“Design thinking tends to communicate that it’s human-centered and starts with empathy,” said Zoltowski. “We want to understand what the user is experiencing.”
To that end, the researchers have been conducting surveys, interviews, and design sessions with multiple stakeholders groups —including faculty, staff, students, and alumni, over the past 1.5 years to both unpack the issues and generate ideas about how the professional formation of biomedical engineers can be more inviting for diversity and inclusion.
They are also completing an identical study in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a distinct but related discipline at Purdue, with hopes that the comparison of the data, analysis, and findings will shed even more light on the systemic issues in the two cultures.
Unlike designing a product or a device, where there are known specs and a specific need, this is not a challenge that will be resolved in a fixed timeframe and there will not be a single prototype to be delivered to a waiting client.
“In engineering, there’s this idea that there is a problem, you solve it, and then you’re done,” Zoltowski said. “But, when you look at diversity and inclusion, we’re thinking about this as an ongoing iterative changing aspect. If our goal is to have a more diverse inclusive engineering school, how do we engage in this an ongoing level?”
Zoltowski notes that the iterative component of design thinking where there are periods of exploring, diverging, broadening, and converging is required given the ongoing nature of the issue.
With half of the study now completed, the researchers are analyzing the data to attempt to answer the question of how useful is engineering design thinking to drive change in the professional formation of engineers with regards to diversity and inclusion. The group will present results at American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference in June 2018 and the IEEE Frontiers in Education conference in October 2018
“It’s exciting,” said Zoltowski. “Not only should it inform and effect change in the Weldon School, but hopefully we can contribute to broader research and knowledge on how to be effective in addressing these complex problems. It’s not just having the immediate, direct impact, but hopefully it’s being able to tie this to a broader endeavor.”
The faculty, staff, and student participants from the Weldon School who volunteered to participate in the design process (and this research study), are also volunteering for the diversity action group of the School and will begin evaluating the ideas generated through the design sessions for implementation in the year to come.
Contact: Andrew Brightman, 765-496-3537, aob@purdue.edu
Grant funding is provided through NSF’s Division of Engineering Education and Centers. Understanding the Professional Formation of Engineers through the Lens of Design Thinking: Unpacking the Problem of Diversity and Inclusion.