By Eileen Zhang and René Capella, HCDE undergraduate students

In late June, after graduating from the Bachelor’s program in HCDE, Dr. Cindy Atman hosted Eileen Zhang and René Capella at the ASEE conference in Portland, Oregon. This reflection chronicles their experience and its impact on their identities as researchers and practitioners of human-centered design.

Train trips in stories usually denote not only a journey, but a transformation from one viewpoint to another. As students we read papers, but we never engaged the authors themselves. We knew about research, but we didn’t consider ourselves researchers. We didn’t know how to begin. Dr. Cindy Atman’s invitation to this conference and mentorship helped us on our way.

As a primary responsibility at ASEE, we supported Dr. Atman in preparing her distinguished lecture, “Design Signatures: A Journey from Design Expertise to Design Awareness.” Supporting Dr. Atman as she poured her life’s work into a one hour lecture demonstrated the scope of a life dedicated to research. It also humbled us to see the immense impact of Dr. Atman’s work. The audience was transfixed by her work, resonating it with their own.

Traveling with Dr. Atman, the Design Signatures in the Wild group held a workshop at the conference. We gathered materials for the event, set up the room, and conducted ethnographic research of the workshop, giving us a kind of deep awareness of the audience’s experience. After the workshop, we provided feedback and observations used by the team to improve future workshops.

At the end of the conference, we spent time with the Design Signatures in the Wild group in a grant writing workshop. The team spent the day brainstorming ideas and collaborating in a distillation process that concluded with a general idea of the work they wanted to pursue for the next year. Our team was dedicated to creating this engaging, creative, thoughtful space of design awareness for these educators, with the hopes that they return to their own classrooms and spark more conversations. We learned what it meant to work together in research and praxis.

In our spare time, we roamed the conference listening to presentations of papers. The conference hosted an overwhelming amount of lectures. Choosing which to visit required planning the night before, but on the day of, in the midst of bustling conference goers and unexpected encounters, we forgot the plans in an attempt to sponge up a firehose of information. While the lectures brought our understanding of the state of research in engineering education, it was the conversations between the lectures, in the hallways and during breaks, where we witnessed the community and became part of it.

In its entirety, this trip widened our awareness of the presence of Human Centered design within the engineering education community— but more importantly, it was an induction into that community. Through the support of our peers presenting their papers, through our engagement with the Design Signatures in the Wild group, and through the support of a prolific researcher, Dr. Atman, this exposure helped us orient ourselves to research. As students, we just read these papers. We knew the world of engineering education existed, but we were detached. Now we understand the shape; we can see its edges and its contours - creating a pathway for our future.

More HCDE Student Travel Reports