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Understanding the global, societal, environmental and economic (GSEE) context of a product, process or system is critical to an engineer's ability to design and innovate. The already packed curricula in engineering programs provide few occasions to offer meaningful experiences to address this issue, and most departments delegate this requirement to an early cornerstone or later capstone design experience as a result, making these courses an ineffective "catch all". To address this challenge, we utilize the paradigm of "product archaeology," to understand the decisions that led to a product's development. Product archaeology is defined as the process of reconstructing the lifecycle of a product--the customer requirements, design specifications, and manufacturing processes used to create it. By considering products, processes and systems as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, we embed GSEE context as a central component in developing design solutions. In the current work, students focus primarily on the useful life of products and their design solutions, rather than on product end-of-life issues. Specifically, in our work we have implemented several approaches to integrate contextual thinking related to GSEE dimensions into a senior level engineering design course. Following Kolb's model of experiential learning and an instructional framework adapted for product archaeology (inclusive of evaluate--explain--prepare--excavate activities) we have restructured the course to embed specific and targeted reflection, dissection, and analysis activities so that student teams effectively address the GSEE factors in their design solutions. This paper provides the theoretical framework of our instructional approach, describes the specific didactic activities we implemented, and summarizes results from our qualitative analysis. Overall, our results suggest that the use of product dissection and GSEE activities is an effective way to equip students with new tools to understand contextual, technical, and functional properties of their design projects.

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert