Conscientious Design Education to Promote Well-Being Engineering

This project aims to serve the national interest by advancing curricula in engineering education and thus improving the education of future engineers. The advent of Industry 5.0 signifies a transition from an economic-centric approach to a focus on social value and well-being and an imperative to equip engineers to incorporate wellness-related factors in their designs and operations. Despite the ongoing discourse on Industry 5.0, which emphasizes the importance of societal value and user well-being, the current engineering curriculum content is predominantly focused on physical modeling and, to a lesser extent, cognitive and psychological performance. This often results in neglecting crucial aspects of well-being, such as stress and positive emotions, autonomy and mastery, and social relationships. Without a curricular intervention, the future workforce will struggle to produce human-centered designs that include social value and well-being, in addition to traditional metrics such as economic value and performance. The need for immediate action to address this gap is evident. To bridge this divide, we propose the development of curricula for conscientious design education with a unified focus on well-being. Industrial engineering, as the engineering major most concerned about human work system designs, has been selected as a testbed for implementing the proposed interventions. The overall goal of this project is to promote well-being engineering through conscientious design education. This goal will be accomplished by 1) Designing a spiral curriculum (100-to-400 level) that includes cognitive and psychological modeling principles and techniques augmenting existing approaches to physical modeling (well-being engineering) and integrating state-of-the-art simulation and sensor technologies to prepare students for the future of the workforce (workforce development); 2) Cultivating and assessing students’ reasoning fluency in their design reasoning and decision-making practices, to promote conscientious design principles that support systems engineered for users’ wellbeing; and 3) Coaching faculty (and, in turn, students) in well-being engineering curricula principles to support both teachers’ pedagogical formation and students’ professional outcomes in conscientious design. In this project, the students will learn about physical modeling and cognitive assessment in sequential modules from first year to senior years and incorporate the knowledge and skill into their senior design projects. Thus, new insights about human factors design will be gained, and better workplace designs will be developed by incorporating well-being concepts into engineering thinking. By creating a formal environment to educate students and ensure their ability to perform as skilled engineers, this project will contribute to this growing job market and offer a competitive edge for American companies. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.