Who you are and how you work: embedding positionality in engineering design

As the Engineering profession increasingly explores the complex relationships between technology and society, the responsibility of engineers is evolving to include considering the socio-technical complexities in which their technology will be embedded [1]. This evolution has led to interest in teaching empathy and reflexivity in undergraduate engineering education, in part to prepare student engineers for effective community engagement in their engineering practice [2] [3]. This practice paper discusses considerations, approaches, and theories that informed our design practice as we incorporated positionality into our course. Positionality was introduced as a foundational design tool to approximately 300 students in a first-year design course at a large, public, research-intensive university. In this work we discuss the integration of positionality as a framework to facilitate self-awareness, intentionality, leadership, reflexivity, and empathy in individual and team engineering design activities.