Resumen de Difficulties student engineers face designing the future
Design can change the world. Growing environmental and social concerns about the role we play as world citizens and caretakers of theplanet have given rise to a green environmental movement and concerns of sustainability. But normative notions of sustainability onlyattack these problems in incremental ways. Another suggested approach, geared towards real impact and breakthrough innovation, is toshift the frame of these growing issues of our time in a different way. Rather than plainly engineer better solutions and implementbetter technology, this paper describes design and design thinking education practice and student examples that seek to change thecontext dramatically, break the mold of current means of thinking about sustainability, and the difficulties student engineers face indoing so. In examining mechanical engineering students doing design work in the context of a graduate level mechanical engineeringdesign course at Stanford University, this paper will highlight some difficulties students have in framing, conceptualizing and designingfor the future.
