NRT: Design for Equity in Policies, Products, Processes, Places and Pedagogy for People: A transdisciplinary approach to graduate research training

The products people use, the processes they follow, the policies that govern them, the places they go to, and the education they receive and provide are all designed experiences. Designers not only determine who can access, use, and benefit from a design, but they can also make the world a better place by: rooting out inequities; making all built environments, products, services and education accessible and inclusive; creating sustainable development practices; and designing policies that benefit everyone. For designs to benefit all and transform society, the design process must consider equity. The next generation of STEM graduate students can play a vital role in this transformation if they are trained to think about issues of equity in the design process. Equity is central to ensuring that all people, regardless of their backgrounds or individualized circumstances can access and use products, services, and systems. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Texas at El Paso will create a new graduate certificate program in design equity and train graduate students to become Equity Design Influencers. The project anticipates training 200 graduate students over 4 years, including 34 M.S. and 7 Ph.D. students who will receive NRT stipends. This NRT certificate will deliver a discipline-agnostic, transdisciplinary and convergent program to train students in equity-centered design and decision-making for policies, products, processes, places, and pedagogy. Students from any discipline will be able to pursue the certificate in preparation for their unique, tailored career paths. Program goals are to: (1) address complex societal inequities in design and decision making, and (2) develop a graduate research training paradigm to produce trainees strong in equitable design thinking and problem solving and nimble enough to adapt and respond to societal inequities. Research efforts are anchored to United Nations sustainable development goals and will converge disciplines, systematically study equity in different phases of design processes, and address inequities in different communities of need including low-resource, vulnerable communities. To promote integration of research, education and training, trainees will participate in community project experiences that align with the research themes in addition to coursework in design equity. Insights from this work will also contribute to understanding whether transdisciplinary and convergent training models cultivate students’ skills for thinking effectively about the interconnectedness of complex societal problems with their inherent global, cultural, and economic contexts. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.