Welcome to this course, “Service Design Methodology: An Intervention for Engineering Capstone Design.” Supported by a grant made possible by the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, our team of faculty and students has designed and created materials that you may choose to import to your own course.
Considering Engineering Service Design
In the engineering curriculum, capstone design courses often offer students the opportunity to develop hands-on solutions to problems by enacting the skills they have learned throughout their coursework. Of course, the technical curriculum provides numerous courses the prepare students to put engineering skills into practice. We might learn an approach to engineering design, such as the process depicted below by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of California Institute of Technology.
What the conventional engineering design process in the undergraduate curriculum could attend to more deeply is gathering insights, particularly from people, and especially community members. Service design methodology introduces a way of thinking about as well as practices for engaging in engineering design. Instead of conceptualizing engineering design as a tool, service design incorporates the human, material, and logistic elements that must work in tandem for a design to not only be successful but also usable by and useful to humans. Therefore, we argue that implementing service design methodology in engineering design capstone courses forwards students’ community engagement. The desired results are enhancing learner performance and a more productive learning experience.
Another way to visualize the engineering design process comes from Bahram Nassersharif (2022) in Engineering Capstone Design, which does account for customers at two stages. However, this process does not engage with the service design adage of designing with people rather than for them (Polaine, Lovelie, & Reason, 2013).
Incorporating Service Design in the Engineering Design Process
Rather, what we argue for is engineering service design, a way of overlapping service design methodology with the engineering design process. Design courses typically incorporate problem-based learning and teach students methods, or know-how, but not methodology, or know-why. In these Canvas materials, we attempt to show how service design methodology offers a sociotechnical framework for engineering design by intersecting technical props and processes with the knowledge and experiences of people who use, interact with, and create those props and processes. In engineering service design, the same steps of the engineering design process are followed, but more attention is paid to gathering insights from people about their needs and the specific contexts of the environments they are working in in order to determine a design solution. Our rough sketch of this conceptual framework is in the Venn diagram below.
