Preparing Engineers for a Global Future through Guided Opportunities to Innovate for Underserved Communities

Abstract

The necessary transformation of engineering education is currently the focus of many debates, primarily focused on how best to prepare engineering students to innovate effectively in a future that is increasingly global. A global future means engineers will not be able to solely depend on their personal and local experiences when designing solutions. This article presents our approach to training future engineers to succeed in this complex global future through opportunities to innovate for underserved communities. Appropriately designed technology solutions can truly transform the lives of people in many situations; especially in underserved communities such as communities in the developingworld and people with disabilities. Yet, designing engineering solutions that are both relevant and accessible to underserved communities is often non-trivial because the innovation teamdoes not share much common ground with the target community. This leads to bad assumptions and other barriers clouding the innovation process, and ultimately resulting in poor solutions that may even exacerbate issues rather than solving them. Over the past decade, we have explored best practices in innovating for underserved communities, and educating students to follow these best practices. The stages of our innovation process include establishing strong partnerships, assessing needs, recruiting and training innovation teams, participatory iterative innovation, dissemination, and deployment. This article introduces our approach to engineering education, describes our innovation process, details the student experience, illustrates our innovation process through two specific projects, surveys the related work,and concludes with lessons learned and a brief summary of futurework.