The development of product archaeology as a platform for contextualizing engineering design

Our long-term objective is to institutionalize and sustain contextual engineering education through product archaeology. Many engineering departments struggle to meet "the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context" (Outcome h) that is required for ABET. As a result, engineering students receive meaningful contextual experiences in piecemeal fashion and graduate with a lack of concrete competencies that bridge knowledge and practice in the global world in which they will live and work. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, our product archaeology framework combines concepts from archaeology with advances in cyber-enhanced product dissection to implement pedagogical innovations that address the significant educational gap. In this paper, we focus on developing a sustainable and scalable foundation to support novel approaches aimed at educating engineering students to understand the global, economic, environmental, and societal context and impact of engineering solutions. We present our vision for this contextual development and present some initial results from the network of institutions in our NSF TUES-funded project.