Designing for Communities: The Impact of Domain Expertise

In support of ABET’s goals for engineering students to achieve greater skill in broad thinking and contextual awareness, this paper illustrates how domain-specific experiences may be helpful for one’s ability to focus on social and human-related factors in a design process. Utilizing data from four playground experts and five engineering experts given the task of designing a playground, our research found that participants with domain expertise (i.e., playground experts) were inclined to consider context (especially socially oriented factors) more often, regarded actors and their use of the playground equipment in a holistic manner, and almost exclusively used professional domain knowledge rather than personal knowledge. The results of this analysis point to the experience required to incorporate broad thinking in design solutions. Introduction and Background Our research seeks to understand the relationships between the possession of expertise in a particular domain and the potential accompanying ability to situate problems and to think broadly during the design process. A domain is defined as a shared system of knowledge and activities that focus on a particular subject, and expertise “...refers to the characteristics, skills and, knowledge that distinguish experts from novices and less experienced people.” 1 Gaining domain expertise involves an amalgamation of experiences that have led a person a person to achieve a particular level of skill and knowledge. 2 The path to achieving domain expertise can be a complex and difficult one that begins, simply, with gaining professional and educational experience. Gaining experience leads to engineers often being tasked with designing projects that demand consideration of local, regional, and even global communities. Such projects may be situated in complex spaces, requiring both technical expertise and an ability to consider broad contextual issues. While the beginning engineer relies predominately upon their educational background; expert engineers hold experiential knowledge in their domain of expertise to aid them in considering a broader array of factors. ABET, the engineering accreditation body, specifically states in Criterion 3h, that engineering programs should help engineering students achieve the “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.” 3 Teaching these skills to engineering students is a challenging task, but one that is critical if engineers are to design for the benefit of the many communities for whom they work. Many hours of practice and experience are essential for gaining domain expertise. 4, 5, 6, 7 For engineers, the primary introductions to their disciplines are encountered through education, and as such it is important that engineering programs provide students with a realistic and expansive understanding of the field. Leckie 8 observed that undergraduates in general are often kept in the dark about important aspect of the disciplines within which they are studying: The students have no sense of who might be important in a particular field... They do not have the benefit of knowing anyone who actually does research in the discipline (except for their professor) and so do not have a notion of something as intangible as the informal scholarly network. Developing a general sense of how a discipline works is essential to gaining expertise and being situated within a community helps to enable this. Lave and Wenger suggested that where individuals are socialized in an environment that is co-constructed by its participants; where they learn, participate, further their particular community, and are able to modify the implicit and explicit rules that guide them on their way; they form communities of practice. 9 Gaining disciplinary experience, including familiarity with the vernacular of the domain and various cultural artifacts and processes is the motivation for placing students in apprenticeships and internships. A first step in distinguishing oneself as an expert is often the “insider” knowledge that is gained through those kinds of experiences. 7, 10 As experience in a domain increases, methods for efficient participation begin to surface, and new mental capacities are developed. The knowledge gained through hours of practice, education, and involvement in community is more expertly organized into larger chunks. 11, 12, 13 This chunking of knowledge allows for some cognitive tasks to become automated, 14 thereby leaving room for higher levels of cognitive activities, capacity to attend elsewhere, or focus on other issues. 11, 15 This research in expertise provides a different perspective on the ways that engineering education fosters, or (at minimum) primes our graduates for the cognitive development of expertise that results from being situated within an engineering domain. Many engineering programs in the United States focus on providing a superior technical education to engineers. Not much focus is given to teaching students to connect broad contextual issues to the problems they are solving. 16 Kazerunian and Foley 17 stated that most engineers are not being offered an education that values creativity in their work, which has impacted breadth of thinking for engineering students. Educators, far too often, promote narrowly focused, prescriptive design methods over providing opportunities for students to explore larger issues and new ways to think about engineering practice. As one example, in the year 2000, 80% of engineering programs did not include ethics-based courses aimed at broadening engineering student thinking. Only a subset of the remaining 20% of institutions included engineering ethics courses, and the others relied on courses in the social sciences or philosophy. 18 As professional and educational organizations began to realize the need for engineers who could think more broadly, research was enacted that explored how engineers approach their work and carry out design projects, with the idea that educational change should be driven by solid research. Kilgore et al. 19 found that first-year engineering students, when asked to work a design task, considered contextual factors that were aligned with their current knowledge, and were less likely to leave their comfort zone. This is also aligned with Ahmed et al’s 20, 21 work, that found that novice engineers were unlikely to ask relevant questions due to their limited experience, sticking to what they know. Ahmed et al. found that engineers were less inclined to follow particular design strategies, since they were unaware of their existence. Kilgore et al. 22 also discovered that while undergraduate engineers were considering different aspects of the lifecycle of a product, their considerations were tied to the strict engineering design process. Atman et al. 23 found that engineering students, when asked in interviews to address a particular topic, addressed slightly more technical concepts than other majors, who addressed social topics more often. This research also found women were considering more contextual factors than men, based on personal interests and ways of knowing. Additionally, Atman et al. 24 found that senior engineering students were considering a broader array of contextual factors over freshman in the problem scoping phase of their design process. Thus, Atman et al. 24 recommended students be presented early on with more real world teaching curricula to introduce them to a variety of situations for increased comfort with varying ideas. The above research leads us to consider how engineering educators are teaching their students design, and how the complexity of engineering problems that are found in professional practice may be better situated in engineering curricula. What follows is a brief discussion of two pedagogical models; Project-Based and Problem-Based learning, that are now found more often in engineering education and may provide the necessary framework for addressing the types of context and community oriented solutions that are the focus of the research we present below. Project-Based Learning Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an experiential mode of teaching that directly addresses the development of expertise through increased number of hours in-situ. 25 There are several specific features of PBL that have made it successful. Engineers are involved in capstone engineering projects where they experience the importance of issues relating to the sociality of a particular environment and learn the impact of contextual issues as they move through the project. PBL students are grouped with people from diverse backgrounds, allowing multiple perspectives on a given subject through interactions among group members. Engineers learn to work across disciplinary lines as a result of group work. Implementing these community based projects early in education, provide experiences to students that lend to continued thinking in areas of community and other contextual concerns. PBL also addresses one of the key issues in the cognitive sciences: transfer, which may be defined as the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to other, new contexts. 25 Problem-Based Learning Problem-Based Learning (the other PBL) has been shown to increase participation and interest in engineering when used as a teaching method, over lecture-based learning. 26 Unlike ProjectBased Learning, Problem-Based Learning has no correct and final solution as the goal of the educational endeavor. Problem-Based Learning may also be used in a shorter term to help students understand specific ideas in their discipline. 27 There are several models of Problem-Based Learning that seek to help educators more easily implement this as a teaching practice into their curriculum. 28 Differences in applications and organization of Problem-Based Learning deal with differences in how students are able to tra