Integrating Ethics, Equity, and Justice into Engineering Design Education at MIT

Engineering designs impact the real world, however, engineering students often are not trained to engage with the societal impacts of their designs. Our previous works have demonstrated that non-engineering design courses at MIT engage more with equity, ethics and justice than engineering courses and that MIT instructors want and need resources and tools to embed these topics into their courses. This project seeks to explore pathways to extend this work to directly support instructors at MIT in embedding these considerations into their courses. We will do this through (1) piloting a newly developed design justice pedagogy tool with undergraduate students at MIT, (2) deploying the pedagogy tool in a mechanical engineering design course in Fall 2024, and (3) conducting workshops and undergraduate instructor trainings to support them in embedding design justice in their courses.