What is the Design Challenge?
The Engineering for People Design Challenge brings a real-world community into the engineering classroom to help students learn the skills and knowledge needed to design for under-served communities, and to be globally responsible engineers. The Engineering for People Design Challenge takes a project learning approach to support students in understanding their impact as engineers on both people and the planet.
Inspired by the EWB Challenge run by Engineers Without Borders Australia, the Engineering for People Design Challenge is run in partnership by Engineers Without Borders South Africa and Engineers Without Borders UK. Since starting in 2011, the programme has reached over 60,000 students across Cameroon, Ireland, South Africa, the UK and the USA.
How does it work?
Each year, we work with a community partner to create a Design Brief that describes that community’s strengths and challenges. The Design Brief consists of a PDF document, video interviews, pictures, infographics and some data-sets.
These resources are then used by universities by engineering lecturers in the first, second and third year of engineering. It is used across disciplines (mechanical, electrical, civil etc.) and is embedded into the curriculum. Students are “challenged” by the Design Brief to define and solve a problem faced by this real community. This is an investment into the education of students as they are taught, in a low-risk environment, to design effective solutions for people and communities.
The top groups from each university, identified and nominated by their lecturers, then submit their work to us at EWB. We then have this reviewed by an international panel and constructive feedback is given to students. The best groups from each university are then invited to a “Grand Finals” event, where the top groups get to present their ideas again, and on consideration of the social, ethical, environmental and economic impacts of their design, prizes are awarded.
Why the Engineering for People Design Challenge?
The key problem that the Design Challenge helps us address is the shortage of skills and knowledge among South African engineers in relation to designing for and with different communities, particularly under-served ones.
The Design Challenge helps us address this gap in a few ways. Firstly, it enables us to bring a real community into the engineering classroom. Describing real people with real strengths and challenges, allows us to use a problem-based learning approach in training engineers to design for different contexts. This student-centric pedagogy has been proven to be more successful than traditional approaches used in engineering teaching.
Secondly, it enables us to target engineering students early in their studies (and therefore careers) when they are most receptive to different ideas and ways of thinking. Since first and second year engineering classes tend to be large (in SA, class sizes can be in the hundreds), lecturers struggle to provide these students with exposure to real world under-served communities. By using technology (e.g. videos and online forums) and the Engineers Without Borders global network, the Design Challenge is able to deliver exposure to real-communities for large scale classes. This “scale” ability truly differentiates this programme from others in the space.
Where is the Design Challenge situated?
The Engineering for People Design Challenge supports students in understanding their impact as engineers on both people and the planet. To do so effectively, we work in collaboration with a community partner to produce a real-world design brief that is shaped by insights and reflections through interviews with the local community. Previous partners have included Makers Valley in South Africa, EcoSwell in Peru, Centre for Appropriate Technology in Australia and Govan Community Project in Scotland. Each year, we choose a different community to work with.
How can you take part?
This Challenge is open to all universities in South Africa, for students in the engineering, architecture and building science fields. To find out more information about taking part in the Engineering for People Design Challenge, please email Robyn Clark at robyn.clark@ewbsa.org
For students who are currently taking part in the Design Challenge, please click this here to be directed to our sign-in page where you will find the Design Brief and other resources.