Brown Engineering faculty Louise Manfredi, Dan Harris, Ian Gonsher and Rich Morales have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to augment core courses and develop a course in the newly formed design engineering undergraduate program that pairs undergraduates with community partners and industry to tackle real-world challenges.
The funding is part of the NSF’s multi-year initiative, the Professional Formation of Engineers, to create and support an innovative and inclusive engineering profession for the 21st century. The program also includes the ethical responsibility of practicing engineers to sustain and grow the profession in order to improve quality of life for all peoples.
“Over the past two decades, efforts to reduce waste, reuse materials, and design products that last have become more important in how we approach business, design, and engineering,” said Manfredi. “These ideas are foundational to a circular economy, a mission that is central to global efforts to fight climate change. Teaching engineering students the concepts of sustainability is now critical, yet many college programs focus mostly on theory and hypothetical scenarios.”
Brown’s project centers on an approach to directly address these deficits: embedding sustainability into core courses using faculty expertise that already exists within the School, developing a new course, and transforming how students learn about sustainability outside of the classroom, such as in makerspaces and independent research projects. The researchers will use this as a blueprint to transform makerspaces, like the Brown Design Workshop (BDW), into a ‘living lab’ that cultivates community-based innovation, strengthens cross-institutional networks, and positions the space as a regional hub for sustainable design education.
Launched in fall 2023, Brown’s curriculum for design engineering was developed to provide students with a broad interdisciplinary foundation and to encourage working across differences to both understand and develop innovative approaches to a full range of societal issues - as well as the underlying causes, structures and systems. Design engineering is a new field of education that results from the growing interdependence of design and technology and actively intersects with the core engineering disciplines.
Principal investigator Manfredi is an Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the BDW. With expertise spanning design, mechanical engineering, and management, Manfredi’s teaching and research focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to environmental impacts of manufactured products and aligning what is made with user needs.
Co-PI Harris is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Brown University with a research focus in fluid mechanics and currently teaches courses in the mechanical and design engineering programs. He has overhauled several traditional engineering courses to have a team project-based learning focus, and is the first to develop a course-based undergraduate research experience course in engineering at Brown. He brings expertise to the team on rapid prototyping, low-cost and accessible science through open-source hardware, community engagement, undergraduate research, and project-based learning in engineering.
Gonsher is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the School of Engineering, and concentration advisor for the design engineering program. He has worked extensively to support the design community at Brown, with the design engineering capstone class as his primary teaching responsibility, as well as courses that give students the technical and conceptual foundations to translate their concepts into working prototypes.
Morales is a Professor of the Practice of Engineering, and co-director of the Master of Arts in Design Engineering (MADE) program, where he teaches decision-making, technology, and systems design. He is also an active student mentor who merges theory and practice to build better futures. A hands-on scholar, strategist, and consultant, his research explores structure, process, and measurement in complex systems.
Christina Smith, Associate Director for Undergraduate STEM Development at The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning and an adjunct lecturer in the School of Engineering at Brown, and Ayako Maruyama, Assistant Professor in Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and practicing designer, teacher, and illustrator, will also contribute to the circularization of the Brown Design Workshop.