HOW AND WHY INSTRUCTORS INCLUDE AND EXCLUDE SOCIAL, POLICY, AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN DESIGN EDUCATION
Name
how-and-why-instructors-include-and-exclude-social-policy-and-ethical-considerations-in-design-education.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
427.19 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8d55826c827696f9ac72e8455a841945
Author(s)
Das, Madhurima
Saadi, Jana I
Santos, Marina
Roeder, Gillian
Ostrowski, Anastasia K
Lee, Stella
Breazeal, Cynthia
D'Ignazio, Catherine
Yang, Maria
Verma, Aditi
Date Issued
July 2023
Journal
Proceedings of the Design Society
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Citation
Das, Madhurima, Saadi, Jana I, Santos, Marina, Roeder, Gillian, Ostrowski, Anastasia K et al. 2023. "HOW AND WHY INSTRUCTORS INCLUDE AND EXCLUDE SOCIAL, POLICY, AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN DESIGN EDUCATION." Proceedings of the Design Society, 3.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
AbstractDesign and engineering are socio-technical enterprises used to solve real-world problems. However, students in these fields are often under-equipped to consider the ethical and societal implications of their work. Our prior work showed that these societal considerations are more consistently embedded in design pedagogy in non-engineering than in engineering courses at MIT. Here, we examine underlying causes for this through a survey of instructors (231 courses from 29 departments). The main contribution of this work is an analysis of whether and how instructors incorporate social, ethical, and policy considerations in design pedagogy. The majority of respondents (60.6%) included these topics in their courses, primarily through discussion of social justice, identity groups, and ethics. These concepts were included more in non-engineering courses (65.8%) than engineering courses (46.9%). Many instructors, especially in engineering, cited irrelevance as the reason for not engaging with these topics in their courses (86.1% compared to 44.2% in non-engineering). We suggest that instructors question this perception and use the examples provided as a starting point to explore integration of these concepts into their technical content.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2023.209
