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"Perhaps the most difficult challenge of all will be to disperse the fruits of engineering widely around the globe, to rich and poor alike."
-NAE Grand Challenges
When decision-making processes of engineers or engineering organizations are inspected closely, the vast majority is best characterized as pursuing one of four goals:
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Implement the Sexy: To apply ‘cutting-edge’ technological methods to accomplish feats that are ‘innovative’, ‘badass’, ‘formerly impossible’, or simply ‘cool’.
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Do what we’re told to: To satisfy the requests of our financial backers, whoever they may be, regardless of both the task and our personal beliefs.
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Make boatloads of money: To create a successful company, build a startup into a unicorn and get acquired, to meet a market need.
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To satisfy our curiosity: Essentially, because we feel like it and enjoy feeling powerful; doing a neat little project, having fun, without a goal involving anybody but ourselves.
When asked what we see as the purpose of engineering, however, many of us would claim something loftier, such as "solve people’s problems" or “improve the state of the world” or “meet people’s needs”. The four goals above don’t necessarily always align with such ends, despite what we might hope. We, however, have the potential to take a different tack.
This different tack can be summed up by the singular goal of the projects in Engineering for Social Justice:
To substantively address a problem that materially impacts the lives of people beyond the most privileged elite.
Other dimensions - whether the method of choice is currently vogue in our field, whether it’s attractive to potential investors seeking to turn a profit, and whether our colleagues are comfortable with it - are explicitly and consciously deprioritized. Engineers who make this transition in mentality rapidly find ourselves facing problems which our forebears disregarded, that our education has inadequately prepared us for, and which traditional engineering problem solving approaches are extremely ill-suited for. Some example problems we might now try to face include:
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How do we break cycles of poverty?
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How do we foster healthy communities?
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How do we prevent police brutality and remove underlying causes?
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How do we ensure universal access to quality healthcare?
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How do we protect the environment?
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How do we empower marginalized groups in pursuit of justice?
These problems are not new to any of us; all that is new here is how we perceive our role in relation to them. It’s extremely unlikely we could ‘solve’ them in entirety by our skill set alone. We must first acknowledge why that is before we investigate how we can help.
The most immediate difference when we adopt this perspective is the sheer complexity of the problems in question. While all of electrical engineering is reducible to a set of 2 equations, no such reduction can be found for the problem of poverty. We are forced to acknowledge that the problems we’ve been taught to solve, featuring force diagrams, known equations, data structures, or chemical formulae, are dwarfed by the intricacy of people’s lived experiences. We must first acknowledge the existence of emergent dynamics at the scale of a person finding meaning or interacting with their cultural surroundings.
None of the coursework of a current engineering degree explores the causes, mechanisms, and effects of the school-to-prison pipeline, environmental racism, or sexism. We must consult experts to ensure we do not act from a place of ignorance. Such experts may be scholars, activists, community leaders, artists, librarians- essentially, all the people our ‘technical’ coursework has rarely held up as important.
Our engineering culture encourages us to balk at such a suggestion, asking how their knowledge is ‘meaningful’ if it’s not expressed ‘mathematically’. However, we must check our assumption- the systems of interest constitute a multitude of complex dynamics above and beyond the current expressivity of mathematics. There is no closed-form solution to questions of oppression. Such an idea is blatantly absurd; how would one possibly mathematically express the role an individual’s disability plays in their lived experiences in a job, in the context of the cultural and social history of mankind? As such, we must look to other, more capable means of knowing and analyzing these dynamics, which said experts commonly employ.
This also implies that while we’ve been taught to conceive of ‘the project’ as only the ‘technical’ aspects, the fact that our goal is at the scale of social systems means the ‘social’ components are just as integral to the project as any code, circuitry, or mechanisms. There are not ‘technical’ and ‘social’ aspects of this project as entities separable from each other, instead, we are constructing sociotechnical syntheses using any and all available manipulatable mediums.
In addition, we as individuals are not ‘outside’ the systems at play; who we are, our experiences, and our identity (collectively our "social location") are integral to and inseparable from our ability to address such problems. When an engineer is attempting to analyze conductivity of a transmission line, their lived experiences are independent of the result. In contrast, given the differences in social location between me, having grown up in upper-middle class suburbs of Chicago, and my cousins who grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota, there’s a substantial difference in our potential to understand and address causes of rural poverty in the small towns of the Midwest. They’ll be familiar with dynamics I am not, they’ll understand perspectives and have lived experiences I have not, and they’ll know history I do not. When seeking information or collaboration, the relationships they create will differ from those I develop, as does the cultural meaning of our involvement. Thus, we must seek out perspectives of and collaboration from the community.
We must actively attend to not only the voices that step forward to collaborate, but also seek out whose perspectives are being excluded, even as we attempt to interface with the communities we’re serving. In doing so, we have to resist homogenizing our acting model of the ‘community’. Note that this requires acknowledging the possibility of competing or adversarial dynamics between subgroups of the community and thus being deliberate in our choices of listening. For example, the parents of children may be their abusers and autists themselves may have different goals than even parents ostensibly advocating on their behalf.
If a more routine senior project fails- a twitter bot produces semicoherent babble, a robotic fish flails uselessly with arrhythmic spasming, or a touchscreen table can only recognize one finger at a time- there’s not really much sunk cost beyond the opportunity cost of your lost time. Regardless of the resultant creation, if one such a project is attempted, added onto your resume’s project list, and forgotten in a dusty closet, the engineering student has de-facto achieved their goal. Our goal differs; for us to succeed at our goal, there must be longevity to the project, with plans in place to perpetuate it including handling whatever ongoing work or cost is necessary. In addition, as marginalized communities or activists are most likely to be critically time-limited, our endeavors have substantive costs in human effort or resources. Being deliberate about the distribution of these burdens during design of the project help maximize our impact relative to the imposed cost.
"After years of having been educated to accept the authority of pre-defined problems coming to them in engineering textbooks, students are trained not to question the legitimacy of specifications (specs), the authority of the client, or the sensibility of the client’s intentions. After receiving the specs, students then embark in a one or two-semester design experience marked by a design concept review, client meetings, prototype testing (with data gathering and analysis), mid-point reviews, manufacturing and budget analyses, and a final design review."
-Dr. Leydens, 2014
Leydens is speaking to a very important distinction between goals. Our new goal, expressed in brief as "address a problem", is markedly different from the currently common “Do what we’re told to”. We cannot simply accept the project proposal as it is given, and must instead apply creativity, research, humility, and whatever else is necessary to actually address the problem in question. This applies to the project proposals listed here as well.
While engineering work, coursework, and research are commonly technology-centric because they focus on particular technologies, our design process must shift to recenter the problem itself. As explained exceptionally well in Leydens 2014 "What is Design for Social Justice?", this refocusing requires listening for underlying user needs, cultural context, and structural conditions at play in the problem instead of simply listening for the prescribed solution’s technical specifications. Leydens 2014 is highly recommended reading on this distinction.
The proposed projects here will hopefully land in the ballpark of a decent design, but it is important to keep in mind that they’re limited by the social location of the original uploaders, and as such they are limited by their background and assumptions. These project proposals are intended as a launching-off point for you to tailor or change according to the complications above. Because of this, the problem dimensions mentioned earlier- namely their complexity, interdisciplinarity, multifacetedness, and consequentiality- must be incorporated in your approach to this project in order for it to succeed at its goal.
Crucial to engineering for social justice is keeping in mind the project priorities. By constantly checking ourselves with the question "Why are we trying to do this?", we can stay on track and maximize impact by avoiding what amount to shiny distractions. Efficacy, suitability, and longevity are more important than incorporating our field’s flavor-of-the-week method or model. These concerns are further explored in discussions of appropriate technology, like in Murphy 2009.
Because this project proposal repository serves many different engineering senior design courses across colleges, students must negotiate with course instructors to tailor the project to fit their particular course requirements. Example types of requirements your class may include are listed here; please feel free to submit pull requests to this repository if you encounter and/or overcome new requirements in your own courses. Please submit a PR to the Collaborating Courses list to represent your course, university, and year.
Engineering Senior Design courses are increasingly commonly including a client collaboration component that entails meeting with an industry contact about the project. The purpose of this involvement often entails aspects spanning gathering information and seeking feedback. One such example requirement can be seen here. Due to our projects’ different goal, while others have specific sponsor companies, we are working in service to an often loosely-affiliated community. In addition, while a company might have a designated contact point person assigned to interact with the student groups, any single contact person is antithetical to our goals due to the multifaceted nature of the project.
Accordingly, seeking feedback and information gathering could be approached by creating a ‘Stakeholders Committee’ of ~4 people spanning multiple different perspectives and backgrounds, akin to an interdisciplinary PhD’s committee. Such a committee should ideally include a mixture of relevant scholars, practicing community activists, members of the marginalized community themselves, and associated representatives. The purpose in selecting this committee is to ensure accountability in our creation of an effective, integrated sociotechnical project to substantively address the problem of interest. Committee members may disagree with each other in understanding or priorities around the problem; this is a feature, not a bug, as not everybody tackling or facing the same problem is the same.
For example, a project automating around common difficulties faced by ADHD individuals might have its Stakeholders Committee consist of:
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Two people with ADHD with differing symptoms, degree of expression, and/or social location
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A therapist or social worker who focuses on or routinely works with cases of ADHD
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A vocal and active member of a neurodivergent/mental disability advocacy network
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An academic researching social impact of adult adhd in the workplace from a cognitive science, human factors, or disability studies background
These varied perspectives help ensure that the different scales, dimensions, and dynamics of the problem-in-context are adequately highlighted and accounted for. Note how while an individual with ADHD may be focused on alleviating their immediate needs or difficulties, a disability studies academic or neurodivergent advocate may have insight to broader structural components that shift the design.
| University | Course & Semester(s) | Project |
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | ECE 445 (2017 Spring) | Initial project proposal format |
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | CS 492/494 (2017 Spring) | Initial project proposal format |
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Murphy, Heather M., Edward A. McBean, and Khosrow Farahbakhsh. "Appropriate technology–A comprehensive approach for water and sanitation in the developing world." Technology in Society 31.2 (2009): 158-167.
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Leydens, Jon A., J. C. Lucena, and D. Nieusma. "What is design for social justice." ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. 2014.
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Riley, Donna. "Engineering and social justice (Synthesis lectures on engineering, technology, and society)." Morgan & Claypool Publishers, Washington (2008). (Amazon link)