Glass boxing the black box: on how social reality gets loaded into engineering design

Abstract

In this paper, we report on two design episodes, to describe engineering students' problem-solving practices, and the underlying reasoning processes, associated with solving complex socio-technical challenges. We show that this form of designing requires reasoning about complex, real world phenomena, using multiple and multi- modal representations, manipulated and integrated throughout the designing process. We describe the interactions observed between the reasoning processes, to derive implications for integrating HSS with engineering curricular practices.