Responsible innovation in biomedical engineering: a value sensitive design intervention

It is essential to educate a generation of the engineering workforce that considers human values such as human welfare, freedom from bias, universal usability, and equity in all the stages of engineering product development. These values should be included alongside conventional technical requirements (e.g., performance effectiveness, reliability and resilience, compliance with technical standards and protocols). One approach to address the need for incorporation of human values in the design is to provide students with frequent learning opportunities to practice adopting an inclusive mindset in their interpersonal interactions as well as in their engineering analytical problem-solving and design practices. We designed an intervention to foster student awareness of non-inclusive designs in engineering and medicine, their own tendencies towards these biases, and the impacts of these biases on neglected demographics. An important component of this intervention was embedding it into the teaching of analytical content: we implemented it in a middle-year analytical course with a heavy focus on model-based learning and mathematical modeling, as opposed to a separate unit or course on inclusion or ethics, or a senior design course. Although we created this intervention in a biomedical engineering course, it could be used in any science and engineering class. In this paper we focus on the intervention’s rationale, its implementation process, and how our approach was guided by the concepts of entrepreneurial mindset and value sensitive design. We report what medical fields were included in students’ brainstorming of flawed designs. We also investigate whether the identity of students (gender, ethnicity) has any relation with the affected stakeholders in the flawed designs in brainstorming examples of biased designs, developing a personal experience story, and a team exercise in developing a case study and proposed solution. Also, we summarize an investigation of whether exposure to classmates’ direct experiences of non-inclusive designs (in contrast to hypothetical experiences) affected their choice of a stakeholder in their project’s topic. Finally, we explore whether students focused on a case study topic which created value for themselves or whether they focused on a topic which benefitted others (and thus, whether empathy resulted from this intervention in inclusive design).