Development of socio-technical and co-design expertise in engineering students

Universities are challenged to educate engineers with a broad set of attributes, including socio-technical and co-design expertise, which will enable them to tackle wicked problems. In this study, we ask: To what extent do courses on human-centred design and systems engineering analysis impact students’ development of socio-technical and co-design expertise? We used scenario-based assessment in a pre-/post-design to evaluate the development of these two attributes in two separate units at two Australian universities. The results show some small changes in the responses students gave to the scenario-based tool, at the end of each course. However, the analysis showed that students were still distant from the optimal levels of socio-technical and co-design expertise required of graduates. Therefore, we suggest that such one-off courses are insufficient to develop socio-technical and design expertise. Instead, we argue that engineering programs need to integrate opportunities to develop such expertise throughout all year levels.