About Time: Visualizing Time at Burning Man

About Time was a 30 foot long, 3000 pound wooden sundial that went up in flames at Burning Man 2019. The piece reflected on the role time plays in our lives. We organize our lives around time—are enslaved to time—and yet we know so little about it. Physicists and philosophers continue to grapple with deep puzzles of time—Is time a fundamental quantity, independent of human actions or observations or is it an emergent property of our perception? This installation projected time using two sundials: a horizontal dial which swept time out across the desert floor and an equatorial dial located on one face of the pyramidal structure. A platform at the peak of the pyramid allowed observers to become the sundial’s apex and to experience 360° views of the landscape. A side doorway invited visitors inside, where they found interchangeable disks of pictographs and words that created shadows with shafts of light by day, and projected a fiery glow of LEDs at night. Exchanging the disks gave visitors control over the space and over time the installation evolved, altering the experience of subsequent visitors. At the end of the installation the piece was burned, a testament to the unidirectional march of entropy and time, underscoring the fleeting nature of the present moment

Unfolding Humanity: Cross-Disciplinary Sculpture Design

Unfolding Humanity is a 12 foot tall, 30 foot wide, 2 ton interactive metal sculpture that calls attention to the tension between technology and humanity. This sculpture was conceived, designed, and built by a large group (80+) of faculty, students, and community volunteers at the University of San Diego (USD). The piece is a dodecahedron whose pentagonal walls unfold under human power, an engineered design that alludes to Albrecht Dürer\u27s 500-year-old unsolved math problem on unfolding polyhedra. When closed, the mirrored interior of the sculpture makes visitors feel as though they are at the center of the universe. The idea for the sculpture began with two USD mathematics professors, they recount their journey elsewhere (Devadoss & Hoffoss, 2019). This narrative focuses on the story of bringing their vision to a reality

About Time: Visualizing Time at Burning Man

About Time was a 30 foot long, 3000 pound wooden sundial that went up in flames at Burning Man 2019. The piece reflected on the role time plays in our lives. We organize our lives around time—are enslaved to time—and yet we know so little about it. Physicists and philosophers continue to grapple with deep puzzles of time—Is time a fundamental quantity, independent of human actions or observations or is it an emergent property of our perception? This installation projected time using two sundials: a horizontal dial which swept time out across the desert floor and an equatorial dial located on one face of the pyramidal structure. A platform at the peak of the pyramid allowed observers to become the sundial’s apex and to experience 360° views of the landscape. A side doorway invited visitors inside, where they found interchangeable disks of pictographs and words that created shadows with shafts of light by day, and projected a fiery glow of LEDs at night. Exchanging the disks gave visitors control over the space and over time the installation evolved, altering the experience of subsequent visitors. At the end of the installation the piece was burned, a testament to the unidirectional march of entropy and time, underscoring the fleeting nature of the present moment

The Complexities and Benefits of Community-Partnered Projects for Engineering Capstone Design Students

Community-partnered engineering projects provide a mechanism for cultivating the development of sociotechnical engineers prepared to design within diverse and complex cultural, environmental, social, and other contexts. During the 2021–2022 academic year, we guided three teams of senior undergraduate engineering students through year-long community-partnered projects for their required capstone design course, which instead typically features corporate/industry-sponsored projects. We analyzed end-of-semester reflections (both fall and spring semester) from each student using inductive thematic analysis to explore how they perceived their experiences. The themes that emerged from the student reflections, including connectivity, transdisciplinary, multiple stakeholders, sustainability, justice, and ethics, are all components of the sociotechnical engineering capabilities that we are working to develop in our students. We consider these findings encouraging, and suggestive that integrating community-partnered projects into engineering capstone design offerings is worthwhile and effective. However, our implementation was not without challenges, such as trying to force the projects to fit into a course structure and timeline developed to support corporate/industry-sponsored project teams, which was burdensome to the community-partnered project teams. In this paper, we highlight both the complexities and benefits of this approach and insights gained from student and instructor reflections

Drones for Good: How to Bring Sociotechnical Thinking into the Classroom

What in the world is a social scientist doing collaborating with an engineer, and an engineer with a sociologist, and together on a book about drones and sociotechnical thinking in the classroom? This book emerges from a frustration that disciplinary silos create few opportunities for students to engage with others beyond their chosen major. In this volume Hoople and Choi-Fitzpatrick introduce a sociotechnical approach to truly interdisciplinary education around the exciting topic of drones. The text, geared primarily at university faculty, provides a hands-on approach for engaging students in challenging conversations at the intersection of technology and society. Choi-Fitzpatrick and Hoople provide a turn key solution complete with detailed lesson plans, course assignments, and drone based case studies. They present a modular framework, describing how faculty might adopt their approach for any number of technologies and class configurations

The “Who” in Engineering: Sociotechnical Engineering as Memorable and Relevant

Does emphasizing the role of people in engineering influence the memorability of engineering content? This study is part of a larger project through which our team developed a new undergraduate energy course to better reflect students’ cultures and lived experiences through asset-based pedagogies to help students develop a sociotechnical mindset in engineering problem solving. In this study, students in the class were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews (n=5) to explore our effectiveness in helping them develop a sociotechnical mindset around energy issues and conceptualize engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor. This study focuses on an activity during the interview where the participants were asked to sort a variety of images associated with class learning experiences along a spectrum of least to most memorable. Emergent themes from students’ responses revolved around learning experiences that included global perspectives and emphasized a “who” (i.e., whose problems, who is impacted by engineering, and what type of engineers the students will choose to become) as the most memorable. Our results indicate that students found the sociotechnical aspects of the course more memorable than the traditional canonical engineering content. These findings suggest that framing engineering content as sociotechnical can be one strategy to increase student engagement, increase memorability of lessons, and help students to think more deeply about their own goals as future engineers