ME228T The Future of Mechanical Engineering Education
In this seminar, we will hear from experts in design and manufacturing education from around the country. They will share their experiences with new teaching modes and their visions for how to reimagine design and manufacturing education. Expect to learn about new teaching techniques, especially involving open-ended design problems, digital fabrication, and testing of prototypes, and about new ways of creating inclusive learning environments for students from diverse backgrounds.
Students and guests attend weekly one-hour lectures, Tuesdays at 4:30 in 530-127, and provide feedback on what they hear via a web survey. Student feedback will be used by the department to help shape the future of our teaching, and to help select new faculty to add to our department. We hope you will join the conversation!
Jan 17: Brandon Reynante, Stanford University
Jan 24: Kate Stephenson, Dyad Engineering
Jan 31: Nathan Melenbrink, Harvard University
Feb 7: Scott Evans, University of Texas at Austin
Feb 14: Eric Richardson, Duke University
Feb 21: Matthew Wettergreen, Rice University
Feb 28: Haakon Faste, California College of the Arts
Mar 14: Matthew Ohline, Intuitive Surgical
Past speakers:
Haakon Faste
Abstract
Practice-based education, through hands on making, is essential to design and engineering. It helps us to integrate knowledge and develop new skills, envision and experience alternative designs, communicate our thinking, and ultimately impact the world through the things we create. Learning to make things well requires individual practice to develop "tacit" or embodied knowledge, yet professionally designers and engineers also work in teams where culture, collaboration and management are central. In this talk I will discuss opportunities to enhance the future of making education, both personally and socially, through examples of design projects from my teaching and practice.
Biosketch
Haakon Faste is a design leader, educator, and innovation consultant. He is currently Design Director for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems at Ford Motor Company, and from 2013-2022 he was Associate Professor and co-founder of the Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. From 2010-2013 he served on the faculty of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where his research centered on socially responsible innovation, design education, and computer assisted collaborative creativity. Haakon holds a Ph.D. in Perceptual Robotics from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, and a BA in physics and studio art from Oberlin College. A former design leader at IDEO in Palo Alto, he has led technology design projects for clients including Toyota, Microsoft, PepsiCo, the New York Yankees and David Bowie.
Kate Stephenson
Abstract
The next two decades will bring a major shift in how products are designed and manufactured on a global scale. Issues like sustainability, social equity and a return to domestic manufacturing will challenge the production infrastructure that has supported us for the last 50 years. Stanford plays a valuable role in this future by educating the engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists who will implement that change. This seminar will present an overview of the broad social and technological issues shaping modern manufacturing, a snapshot of education programs attempting to address these changes, and specific examples of traditional design and manufacturing curriculum updated and adapted for new contexts.
Biosketch
Dr. Katherine (Kate) Stephenson is a Stanford Engineering PhD with a deep technical consulting background in new product ventures and manufacturing. She has a twenty-year history of strategic early-stage technical projects in a range of industries, including medical device, drug delivery, advanced manufacturing, telecom, and aerospace. A long-term resident of California’s Silicon Valley, her active network spans the start-up community, including R1 academic centers, incubators, investors, and startups. She is a speaker, author, industry event facilitator and mentor who believes passionately in connecting and educating diverse groups of people to address the complex "wicked" problems in our world. A "maker" in both her professional and personal life, she spends her off hours training her teenagers in tool use in her garage, creating and playing elaborate tabletop strategy games and nerding out over manufacturing equipment at trade shows.
Scott Evans
Abstract
The only way to really learn how to design, fabricate or prototype is to actually do these things. Fortunately, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent building and operating prototyping facilities at universities across the Unites States, often touted and compared by the number of square feet, the number of 3D printers, the number of classes and the total number of visitors. But more important is where students start, what they create, how they grow and how they help each other along the way. It’s the culture in combination with programming, collaboration (with curricula, programs and organizations) and facilities that matters and can serve as a foundation of a vibrant community. One that can be welcoming to complete novices from any background, inspiring for students at all levels, and ultimately help every student evolve toward becoming a collaborator, mentor, courageous designer, inventor and innovator.
Come join this seminar to learn why culture is key and how programming, collaboration and facilities can evolve into something really special. It’s a process that takes time and is probably never complete. But, thinking in terms of this ecosystem and aligning the many pieces towards both enhancing real design work (including invention and innovation) and the creation of designers is inherently about greater impact, greater value and creating the future of education. Even now, it’s increasingly common for companies to arrive at university campuses asking students not, “what did you study”, or ”what do you know” but rather, “what can you do?”
Biosketch
Dr. Scott Evans is the Director of Texas Inventionworks (TIW) in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. TIW is a program that includes product development, innovative curriculum, partnerships with many colleges across campus and facilities for building almost anything. Dr. Evans has designed and built products and manufacturing processes in many industry sectors, created R&D programs, founded materials science startups, served as an innovation consultant to engineering companies in several countries and developed graduate-level technology commercialization courses. In his most recent class, teams of students from seven different colleges chose meaningful problems and created new products to solve them. Dr. Evans studied mechanical engineering at The University of Arizona, The Georgia Institute of Technology (researching MEMS devices) and The University of Texas (researching additive manufacturing) earning a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. respectively.
Matthew Wettergreen
Abstract
Rice University’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) opened in 2009 simply as a physical space for undergraduate engineering students to conduct their work in a collaborative setting. Despite having all the machines and tools of a modern makerspace, it is the OEDK’s community and novel engineering design curriculum, not the tools, that have revolutionized engineering education at Rice, evolving this collaborative hub to encourage engineering students at all levels to tackle authentic, real-world design challenges. Central to this curriculum is the use of the engineering design process as a unifying principle that spans courses and extracurricular opportunities. Students work in multidisciplinary teams and are supported by a web of mentors who emphasize the use of this design process, analytical thinking, engineering rigor, defensible decisions, teamwork, technical communication, and time management. A hallmark of our approach is the use of readily available materials as a starting point for all student design projects regardless of level or skill, teaching students to build like the rest of the world. Students who graduate having spent extended time in the OEDK benefit from practicing their technical and professional skills and are prepared to tackle complex and pressing global challenges and emerge as engineering leaders in their fields. In this talk, you’ll hear about the development and constant redesign of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen’s hands-on engineering design curriculum and how we might inform new engineering design curriculums of the future.
Biosketch
Matthew Wettergreen is Director of the Global Medical Innovation Master of Bioengineering program at Rice University. He is also an Associate Teaching Professor at the award-winning Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) at Rice University, recruited as the first full-time faculty. At the OEDK he co-developed six of the seven engineering design courses in the design curriculum, including the flagship First-Year Engineering Design and Prototyping and Fabrication course. Wettergreen is the co-author of the textbook Introduction to Engineering Design. Wettergreen has over ten years of experience developing client-based engineering design courses, and a deep interest in engineering education, specifically programming that can be employed to build capacity for student development in makerspaces. Building off of this interest, he has taught and mentored faculty in Brazil, Costa Rica, and Sub-Saharan Africa to develop engineering design curriculum featuring research-supported teaching strategies. He holds degrees in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois-Chicago (B.S.) and Rice University (Ph.D.).