- Title
- Human-centrics and design thinking in engineering practice
- Creator
- Reilly, Warren A.; McBride, Bill
- Relation
- 29th Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference (AAEE 2018). Proceedings of the 29th Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference (Hamilton, New Zealand 9-12 December, 2018)
- Relation
- https://www.aaee2018.com/mihi-welcome/
- Publisher
- University of Waikato
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Context: Throughout 2015 and 2016, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Newcastle redefined the suite of engineering programs on offer to meet the future needs of students and society. One of the key areas being addressed was to create a robust scaffolding to the professional practice courses running vertically through the programs. The culmination course in this series is – ENGG4500 Engineering Complexity. This paper describes the implementation of this human-centric course, the trials and successes in the first offering of this new and challenging course. Purpose: To provide guidance to the engineering education community resulting from the development of our senior experiential learning course, which focusses on the role of engineering in; social complexity, conflicting project stakeholders and the potential for Design Thinking to play an active role in managing them. Approach: The course was crafted as a deliberate break from traditional Engineering method and application towards a focus on human-centric problem solving and empathic design. Lecture topics were purposefully challenging in their breadth, while the related assignments and projects were scaffolded to keep them relevant to multiple disciplines of students. Tutorials were staged as supportive environments for students to explore pathways within the multi-solution problems and the purposeful application of abductive logic. Assignments were constructed as a series of diversely related challenges which provided context for the students own reflective journal on the connections between the projects and their relevance to engineering practice. Results: The first offering of this course, in 2017, was evaluated based on; formal and informal feedback, attendance at lectures and tutorials and the level of engagement displayed by the students. With some initial guidance, students were able to perceive and appreciate the benefits of each week’s content and how they combined into a congruous body of lessons. The human centred assignments generated high levels of interest reflected by high rates of attendance and participation. Soft skills such as communication and empathy were given relevance by anchoring them in real world case studies and scenarios. Our reflection of our first offering has lead us to alter the assessment criteria with the intent of increasing the level of self-directed learning developed by the students. Conclusions: Project based learning is an effective tool for building student comprehension of the demands of complex engineering problem environments. Case studies drawn from commercial practice are necessary to keep the confidence of the students that the broad ranging topics are relevant to engineering practice. Student feedback suggested that, due to the diverse nature of the topics within this course, it would be beneficial to introduce the fundamental aspects of these approaches in earlier years of the programs. The progression of learning across these professional practice courses have been mapped to ensure future offerings of these courses will introduce and support the key topics delivered within ENGG4500.
- Subject
- human centred engineering; design thinking; engineering complexity; empathic design; abductive logic
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1404566
- Identifier
- uon:35362
- Language
- eng
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