Bringing the everyday life into engineering education

Abstract

To successfully design and engineer solutions for today's and tomorrow's rapidly changing and expanding global contexts, in which people are confronted with new opportunities and challenges each day, engineering programs should be training their students to become broad based professionals, who are aware of the actual needs, values and behaviors of the people that use their solutions in their everyday life, work or play. This paper argues that in order to built such an awareness, engineering students should acquire direct, first-hand experiences of real people in real contexts. It presents a number of techniques that can be used to gain such experiences. Each technique is briefly described and illustrated with examples from our Industrial Design Engineering program. Knowledge, skills and attitude that are acquired through the use of the techniques are listed and reflected upon. Finally, our experiences with implementing the techniques into our program are discussed in view of their relevance for other engineering programs.