Design awareness is the practice of being cognizant of the steps one takes in the design process and how one moves through them. Design awareness can help designers make more informed choices and find the best pathway through their design processes. In a quarter-long seminar, students explored the concepts of design awareness and created prototypes for a design awareness tracking tool to help them stay aware of the design process while fully immersed in it. The goals of this research are to explore methods of teaching students design awareness and to determine the effectiveness of these methods at demonstrating concepts of design awareness and the tools that can help them stay aware. The seminar began with students keeping a journal as they engaged in a design project over the spring break. The students closely examined their own design processes while exploring other methodologies of design. The seminar culminated in student presentations of their sketched prototypes for an artifact designed to increase their personal design awareness. Students reflected on their experiences and were found to have new definitions and understandings of the design process and what it meant to them. Follow-up research explored one design awareness tracking tool and the development of a physical working prototype. The design awareness tracker could record a design process through the different design activities that were engaged in. Data from paper prototypes of the device demonstrated that using the device increased users awareness as engaged in the design process. Further work is being done to widen the scope of design awareness teachings to reach a broader audience.

Social robots may be an effective and appropriate technology to help reduce stress in adolescents, thereby improving mental health. Previously, we designed a social robot that teens found engaging and desirable to help them with stress. Moving forward, we were curious about how different robot platforms affected adolescents’ stress levels and robot preferences. We conducted an exploratory study with seventy-one US adolescents (ages 14-21) comparing interactions on three different technology platforms: computer screen, physical robot, and immersive, virtual reality. Participant stress levels and attitudes towards robots were measured along with their momentary ratings of stress and levels of verbal engagement. Finally, participants completed an exit survey and interview in which they identified and discussed their preferred platform. The physical robot was rated most comfortable and resulted in significantly reduced momentary stress. However, after experiencing all three platforms, most adolescents preferred the virtual reality environment, with significant gender differences among preferences. 

Mental health and wellbeing of undergraduates in STEM is an important and pressing issue in college that needs to be addressed both culturally and institutionally. The UW College of Engineering (COE) is a high-stress environment, facilitated in part by the college’s competitive admission process, making it an interesting case study to look at this question. The purpose of this research project is to understand the characteristics of mental health of undergraduates in the COE and determine if there is a noticeable difference between mental health before and after studying engineering. I hypothesize that is an overall poor quality in mental health outcomes across all groups. The study utilizes a mixed-method design, incorporating a survey and qualitative data. Survey results recorded numerical data and free response questions to assess mental health. The data was analyzed and broken down for further analysis by gender, race, etc. Preliminary results suggest disparities between groups based on social characteristics. This research is important because it will help inform the further study of mental health in engineering environments and provide direction for the COE to address these issues.

Systematic underrepresentation and the predominance of cisgender male voices in STEM fields put women and queer students at disproportionate risk and in need of support. Addressing these communities and redesigning access to resources is vital to their continued growth and development. This project aims to address the mental health of undergraduate students and the resources available at the UW’s Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) department. The project utilizes a mixed-method survey and interview protocol to understand students’ experience with their mental health in HCDE and their awareness of available resources. With this data, I will analyze trends amongst students to identify disparities and key issues for students and then create a speculative design for how the HCDE department can better support their students. Speculative design is a framework for redesigning thought patterns and systems. I am currently in the data-collection phase and have released the survey. Based on first-hand observations and literature review, I expect to see disproportionately poor mental health outcomes in queer and women students. I also expect that a majority of participants are unaware of the existence/extent of many of UW’s current resources. Diversity is vital to a department’s success, especially because HCDE prides itself on its inclusivity. This research will illuminate how certain groups of students are supported more than others. These voices are often not recorded and demographic details not asked for beyond age and sex, meaning researchers cannot directly address specific populations that are historically underrepresented and create a working framework to better support them.

The English language Wikipedia is notable for its large number of articles. However, 288 other active language editions of Wikipedia have also developed through the intricate interactions of contributing editors. While the editor interactions in the English Wikipedia have been researched extensively, these other language editions remain understudied. To understand how editors currently come to consensus in article building in the Spanish language, a team of researchers has leveraged an existing English framework that depicts how power and policies play a role in mass collaboration. Using this English language framework, we are using qualitative coding methods to build a unique model of the editor interactions on the Spanish language Wikipedia. The results of this study will help contribute to a deeper understanding of how a framework in a different language edition of Wikipedia varies from the English. Our preliminary results show that policy plays a large role in justifying editor decisions for the edits they make on various articles. Furthermore, our research findings have expanded our knowledge of the issues surrounding replication of an English framework in a different language platform.

Makerspaces are an emerging tool in the engineering education field. Compared to the current standard of formal, class-based education, makerspaces provide a multitude of resources meant to support students through more informal, project-based learning. This study is part of a larger project exploring supporting design learning through design decision making. Here we investigate how students make material decisions when pursuing projects in a university makerspace. What kinds of questions, options, and criteria do they explore, and what rationale do they use to make their final choice? How does this change in time, across different projects, and across different students? In previous work, 7 undergraduate students completed a self-driven project while documenting their process and anything else they felt was relevant. During this study, 6 researchers analyzed written traces of the students’ project progress. Material and tool decisions were identified, and coded to present questions, options, and criteria over time using the Design Space Analysis framework. Trends were identified across students, time, and different materials or tools. Through our analysis, we discovered the following results. Though students are pursuing different projects, they all deal with similar decisions around material and tool choice during their processes. For most decisions, students consider very few options, although there are some where more are contemplated. Regarding criteria, students consider cost, aesthetics, and availability, but often not specific functionality requirements. Students naturally provide design rationale as part of their process, but it is not very well developed. The results from this study will allow us to gain greater understanding on what students tend to consider, and develop methodology to make a greater number of potential options more visible to students during their project processes.