From aspiring to authentic engineers: prioritizing real people and real problems in engineering through service design methodology

Abstract In teaching multimodal communication to undergraduate biological engineering majors, we noticed that students often prioritized innovation over people when engaging in the technological design process. As a result, the instructors introduced service design methodology and provided instruction to put people more at the forefront of students’ minds and designs. Student teams produced 1-minute videos demonstrating how their designs worked to solve a problem for the benefit of people, and one team’s video is investigated here within a multimodal (inter)action analysis (MIA) framework. We sought to determine if MIA could help communication instructors see evidence that students integrated service design into their design process as well as whether students’ use of engineering languages enabled and empowered their participation as engineers. In analyzing the video, we claim that the video not only represents but also enacts an interaction between targeted users – who are real people – and students as newly formed engineers. Ultimately, we argue that MIA also helps teachers to see and to appreciate the actual interaction of real people and practicing engineers in the technological development process.