Integrating social aspects and group work aspects in engineering design education Eswaran Subrahmanian, Arthur Westerberg, Sarosh Talukdar, James Garrett, Annette Jacobson, Chris Paredis, Cristina Amon Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Paulien Herder and Adam Turk Technical University of Delft, Netherlands Introduction Over the last several years, the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES), from its origins as the Engineering Design Research Center (EDRC), has evolved two elective courses addressing the social and group aspects of engineering design. These courses are offered to students in the engineering undergraduate curricula as part of a design minor. The importance of these courses can be understood in light of the statement in the Report by the National Academy of Engineering on “Engineering as a Social Enterprise” that less than 2% of the population of the United States are engineers (Sladovich, 1991). The social impact of engineers on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people is immense, and creating an awareness of their impact on society has been rather sparse in current engineering education. The two courses taught at ICES are distinct in character in that they address social and group work issues at two different levels: a course on formulating engineering problems and a product design course that has industrial partners as clients. The first course is open only to engineering majors, while the second course is open to all students on campus. In the fall of 2000 we extended the first course to be a cross Atlantic joint course taught simultaneously at both TU Delft in the Netherlands and CMU. The primary goal of the problem formulation course has been to emphasize the importance of negotiations and tradeoffs among the stakeholders in the formulation of any design problem. Further, we emphasize the need for a precise articulation of the problem to serve as a contractual agreement among the stakeholders. This second course has attracted students with majors from industrial design, technical writing, and human computer interaction, as well as students from all of the engineering disciplines. This course is a project course with the objectives of having students work together in a group with an industrial partner and of cultivating within the students a healthy respect for other disciplines and their high value in contributing to engineering design. An important aspect of both of these courses is we have the students learn by doing and from exemplars before we teach them the generalizations. This approach is usually much more interesting and is the reverse of much of the lecturing they see in many of their classes (Felder, 1993). In the next sections we shall lay out the pedagogical objectives of these two courses and the experience we have gained in teaching them. In the concluding section, we contend that these two courses are complementary and are very important in creating a well-rounded multi- dimensional (social and technical) perspective on the role of engineering design in society. Problem formulation in engineering design (Herder, Subrahmanian, Talukdar, Turk and Westerberg)