Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2019.1614006
E. Reddy, G. Hoople, A. Choi-Fitzpatrick
ABSTRACT In an interdisciplinary project-based course, the topic of ‘drones’ served as an essential boundary object both for the students themselves and instructors. Instructors developed the course to facilitate productive exchanges between students from schools of engineering and peace studies involved. In this critical participation paper, we use an experimental reflection and analysis method to explore the instructors’ experience with this class. We demonstrate how this boundary object both facilitated some of the most desirable outcomes related to interdisciplinary partnerships and interfered with them by making collaboration without consensus – or explicit disagreements – possible. The kinds of troublesome surprises that instructors reflect on might be understood as indicative of ecologies of ideas, priorities, and practices that students and instructors bring to the classroom. We suggest that other instructors might also benefit from reflecting on their experiences with interdisciplinarity in the way that we have here.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2019.1567521
T. Saidi, C. Mutswangwa, T. Douglas
ABSTRACT Medical devices are indispensable in the diagnosis, treatment and management of disease. To enhance the usability of medical devices, human factors engineering (HFE) has been widely applied. While it takes into account human capabilities and limitations, the use of HFE in the design of medical devices has challenges that render its implementation incomplete, resulting in its potential not being fully exploited. This study examines the literature on HFE to identify gaps and review recommendations with regard to its application in the design of medical devices. The literature reveals that HFE tends to place emphasis on the reduction of errors at the expense of medical device usability, that it has challenges in drawing on multiple perspectives, that it provides limited space for creativity and innovation, that it does not give adequate attention to contextual factors, and that communication barriers interfere with its implementation. The literature suggests that the shortcomings of HFE are methodological. To fill the gap, we propose the use of design thinking in HFE, not as a substitute but as a complementary approach, for enhancing usability. Design thinking, by virtue of being a human-centered approach, has the potential to add value to HFE by incorporating the subjective components of usability.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2019.1613070
Cyrus C. M. Mody
Greetings for a new year and a new volume of Engineering Studies. Issue 11.1 has some exciting content, all broadly concerned with how to educate interdisciplinary engineers who will be more attuned to societal context in their design practices. Yet despite that common thread, this issue’s two articles, one Report, and one Critical Participation piece approach the topic from very different directions. That diversity in striving toward a common aim is one of the strengths of this field and its journal. The most personal of this issue’s contributions is our Critical Participation piece, ‘Interdisciplinarity in Practice: Reflections on Drones as a Boundary Object’, by Elizabeth Reddy, Gordon Hoople, and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick. The authors describe a course at the University of San Diego created by Hoople (a faculty member in USD’s School of Engineering) and Choi-Fitzpatrick (a faculty member in USD’s School of Peace). The point of the course was to foster an interdisciplinary environment in which engineering and peace studies students would teach and learn from each other and cause each other to question their own assumptions. Reddy, as a postdoctoral fellow and cultural anthropologist supported at USD by the National Science Foundation, approached the course as an ethnographic field site where she could interact with the students and facultymembers participating in one of the projects funded byNSF’s Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments program. Hoople andChoi-Fitzpatrick assigned the students to develop a ‘drone thatmight have a positive social impact’, on the theory that ‘drones’ (a popular rather than technical category) are a controversial technology thatwould nudge the students toward frank and productive interdisciplinary debates. Unfortunately, the interdisciplinary ideals of the course fell somewhat short in practice. Instead of the peace studies students prompting the engineering students to take amore critical stance, in practice the presence of the engineering students seems to have given the peace studies students leeway to take a less critical stance. Fortunately, the authors take that setback as an opportunity to reflect on what happened, draw some lessons, and put their experiences in front of the engineering studies community for further discussion. One thing I like about this article is that it reinforces the long-standing ties between peace studies and engineering studies; these are fields that ought to be natural allies.1 But intellectuallywhat I find exciting here is the intersection of two forefront topics in engineering studies and related fields. On one side, there is now a fast-growing critical literature on interdisciplinarity. For many years now, ‘interdisciplinary’ has been used as a synonym for ‘good’ on many university campuses, especially but not only in North America. And interdisciplinarity can be a force for good, as this journal tries to demonstrate. But it is not an automatic good, and it s
恭贺新的一年和新一期的《工程研究》。第11.1期有一些令人兴奋的内容，都是关于如何教育跨学科的工程师，使他们在设计实践中更加适应社会环境。然而，尽管有这些共同的线索，本期的两篇文章，一篇报告和一篇关键参与从非常不同的方向来探讨这个主题。朝着共同目标努力的多样性是这一领域及其期刊的优势之一。本刊最个人的贡献是我们的关键参与作品，“实践中的跨学科:对无人机作为边界对象的反思”，作者是Elizabeth Reddy, Gordon Hoople和Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick。作者描述了圣地亚哥大学的一门课程，该课程是由Hoople(美国工程学院的教员)和Choi-Fitzpatrick(美国和平学院的教员)共同创建的。这门课程的重点是培养一个跨学科的环境，在这个环境中，工程学和和平研究的学生将相互教授和学习，并使彼此质疑自己的假设。雷迪是美国国家科学基金会资助的博士后研究员和文化人类学家，她把这门课作为人种学领域的一个站点，在那里她可以与参与国家科学基金会“革命性工程和计算机科学系”项目的学生和教师互动。胡普尔和崔-菲茨帕特里克要求学生们开发一种“可能产生积极社会影响的无人机”，他们的理论是，“无人机”(一种流行而非技术类别)是一种有争议的技术，它将推动学生们进行坦率而富有成效的跨学科辩论。不幸的是，这门课程的跨学科理想在实践中有些不足。而不是和平研究的学生促使工程专业的学生采取更多的批评立场，在实践中，工程专业的学生的存在似乎给和平研究的学生采取较少的批评立场的余地。幸运的是，作者把这个挫折作为一个机会来反思所发生的事情，吸取一些教训，并把他们的经验放在工程研究社区的前面进行进一步的讨论。我喜欢这篇文章的一点是，它加强了和平研究与工程研究之间的长期联系;这些领域应该是天然的盟友但在智力上，我发现令人兴奋的是工程研究和相关领域的两个前沿主题的交集。一方面，现在有一个快速增长的跨学科批判性文献。多年来，在许多大学校园里，“跨学科”一直被用作“好”的同义词，尤其是在北美，但不仅仅是在北美。正如本杂志试图证明的那样，跨学科可以成为一种积极的力量。但这并不是一件自然而然的好事，有时甚至会对其推动者的目标产生反作用我们需要对跨学科有一个批判性的理解，如果它要做到它所要求的事情——像这篇文章这样的文章是一个重要的贡献。
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2019.1567522
J. Fischer, M. Pečujlija, Djordje Cosic, B. Lalic
ABSTRACT With a sample of 358 students of engineering management and 195 engineering managers, using an ad hoc questionnaire, the paper examines the importance of professional ethics as a constitutive element of the engineering management profession in Serbia. The results indicate that professional ethics is an essential element of constituting this relatively young profession in Serbia.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2019.1576693
Rider W. Foley, B. Gibbs
ABSTRACT If it is understood that engineers are ‘turning dreams to reality,’ then educators share the responsibility for supporting engineers in developing the capacities to consider the future impacts of their decisions. Yet even the most competent engineer's decisions can contribute to macro-ethical failures that arise from narrow problem framing, unevenly distributed risks and benefits, or design solutions unfit for their intended social and cultural contexts. This paper describes how macro-ethical failures can arise at different points in engineering design processes, and considers how competences associated with responsible innovation might assuage those vulnerabilities. To build those competences among future professional engineers, examples of pedagogical approaches are presented at three scales: activities, courses and curricula. For scholars and educators interested in engineering ethics, this article challenges approaches that favor individualistic understandings of responsibility, instead seeking to support learners’ awareness of, and ability to, ameliorate macro-ethical failures. For scholars and educators interested in operationalizing responsible innovation as a learning outcome that aligns with engineering practice, we offer an entry point for that conversation.
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2019.1613760
G. Downey
We in engineering studies have lost a valued friend and colleague. On November 8, 2018, Chyuan-Yuan Wu died of liver cancer. A joyful life filled with irrepressible energy, laughter, and care for o...
{"title":"In Memoriam Chyuan-Yuan Wu (吳泉源) 1961–2018","authors":"G. Downey","doi":"10.1080/19378629.2019.1613760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2019.1613760","url":null,"abstract":"We in engineering studies have lost a valued friend and colleague. On November 8, 2018, Chyuan-Yuan Wu died of liver cancer. A joyful life filled with irrepressible energy, laughter, and care for o...","PeriodicalId":49207,"journal":{"name":"Engineering Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"5 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19378629.2019.1613760","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47614239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2018.1546728
Cyrus C. M. Mody
Welcome, readers, to volume 10, issue 2–3 of Engineering Studies. As you might infer from our combining the final two issues of volume 10, the journal is looking for additional content. We have a n...
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Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2018.1550785
A. Slaton, A. Pawley
ABSTRACT For decades, American researchers have brought intellectual, financial and labor resources to understanding minority underrepresentation in engineering, including through studies of persistent racial and gender discrimination in higher engineering education. This paper considers prevailing standards for legitimate and significant research in this area and the persistent stigma associated with the study of small populations. The preference among many engineering education research producers and consumers for the ‘large-n’ brings with it presumptions about human differences including ideas of race, gender, disability and other categories by which subjects are customarily sorted for analytic purposes. This paper asks how such epistemic preferences enact power, showing how taxonomic inclinations may prevent incisive understanding of demographic privilege in U.S. higher technical education. We offer an illustrative contrast to such studies, describing a qualitative research project on underrepresented minorities in U.S. engineering schools, called ‘Learning from Small Numbers’. This project shows the analytic value of intersectional, Queer, and Disabilities Studies theories to interrogate inequity in engineering education. We argue that the reflexivity and indeterminacy supported by these theories illuminates the ruling relations of academic social sciences overall, while also reflecting on our own research preferences. There is no feature of an investigative project, including definitions of subject populations and choice of research methodology, that is not actively chosen by researchers, and it is the profound social consequences of these choices in equity-focused engineering education research that we want to consider.
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Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2018.1523176
Gökçe Günel
ABSTRACT This article studies the production of a power grid across six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, known as ‘the backbone,’ which has been conceptualized as an answer to power outages. First it analyzes how experts working with and around the GCC Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) advance claims to a regional territorial imagination. Second, it shows that the construction of the grid not only indicates a shift in the material arrangement of wires and substations, but also necessitates new understandings of transparency and a new formula for the electricity price, facilitating the cutting of government subsidies along with additional price increases. Third, it interrogates how electricity is consumed in the region. Policy-makers expected that electricity price increases would lead to lower rates of consumption. Yet after price hikes were instituted, analysts reported how they had no impact. Users behaved in ways that the grid’s engineers did not anticipate. Overall the article shows how various actors conduct ‘boundary work,’ that is, how they set limits between the political, the financial and the technical while producing the backbone. The article explores how this boundary work helps stabilize a particular sociotechnical imaginary of energy security in the GCC, masking anxieties associated with a future beyond oil.
{"title":"The Backbone: Construction of a Regional Electricity Grid in the Arabian Peninsula","authors":"Gökçe Günel","doi":"10.1080/19378629.2018.1523176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2018.1523176","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article studies the production of a power grid across six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, known as ‘the backbone,’ which has been conceptualized as an answer to power outages. First it analyzes how experts working with and around the GCC Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) advance claims to a regional territorial imagination. Second, it shows that the construction of the grid not only indicates a shift in the material arrangement of wires and substations, but also necessitates new understandings of transparency and a new formula for the electricity price, facilitating the cutting of government subsidies along with additional price increases. Third, it interrogates how electricity is consumed in the region. Policy-makers expected that electricity price increases would lead to lower rates of consumption. Yet after price hikes were instituted, analysts reported how they had no impact. Users behaved in ways that the grid’s engineers did not anticipate. Overall the article shows how various actors conduct ‘boundary work,’ that is, how they set limits between the political, the financial and the technical while producing the backbone. The article explores how this boundary work helps stabilize a particular sociotechnical imaginary of energy security in the GCC, masking anxieties associated with a future beyond oil.","PeriodicalId":49207,"journal":{"name":"Engineering Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"114 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2018-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19378629.2018.1523176","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42944568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-07-02DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2018.1485024
J. Keen, A. Salvatorelli
ABSTRACT In many disciplines of engineering, the professional engineering license is an important credential for career advancement. To attain an engineering license, one must pass the Principle and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam after a set amount of time in practice (defined by the state granting the license). While the national pass rate for the exam is available to the public, pass rates based on gender is not collected as most states do not track this demographic. The purpose of this study is to determine the PE exam pass rates for men and women. Pass rate information by gender was requested from each state’s licensing board. When gender information was not available, a list of all individuals who sat for the exam and their results were requested. From this list, gender was assigned based on individual names and a pass rate by gender was determined. These data enable a conclusion to be drawn as to whether women are passing the PE exam at a similar rate as men.
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