Soap-Making Process Improvement: Including Social, Cultural and Resource Constraints in the Engineering Design Process

Abstract

-The engineering profession is increasingly recognizing that engineers' abilities to utilize a systems perspective and collaborate on multidisciplinary teams are critical professional competencies required to solve contemporary engineering challenges. Understanding context, including but not limited to social and cultural context, is one aspect of systems thinking that is important to effective problem-solving, yet such training is not yet standard in our engineering curricula. Humanitarian engineering-related capstone design projects offer both hands-on and field opportunities to integrate social and cultural appropriateness into a formal engineering design curriculum. Over the 2015-2016 academic year, Oregon State University offered a capstone project aimed at optimizing and implementing an improved soap-making process for TERREWODE, a non-governmental organization in Uganda. The ultimate goal of this soap-making project was to expand income-generating opportunities for victims and survivors of obstetric fistula. The project consisted of a six-month, on-campus design phase and a three-week field implementation and research trip in Soroti, Uganda. Six Social Justice (SJ) criteria were used in assessing project context and developing design requirements. Throughout the design phase, experimental testing drove the majority of design decisions. During field implementation and research, the three-student capstone design team worked closely with TERREWODE and their members to optimize the process, understand cultural conditions, and recommend options for potential local solar power systems.

Liquid Soap Production from Catfish (Pangasius hypophthalmus) Fat Waste

“…The saponification reaction can produce solid soap and liquid soap. The type of soap depends on the alkali used [8]. Liquid soap can be formed when fatty acids are reacted with KOH [9].…”

Engineering Design and Social Justice: A Systematized Literature Review

“…On the other hand, the results present an improvement of communication skills given by the interdisciplinary [32] and cross-cultural experiences [29], the possibility to prepare future engineers for fieldwork according to what is stated by ABET outcomes [30] or due to humanitarian engineering courses [34], and the stimulation of collaboration and the exchange of ideas [31]. Also, it was possible to find that, although interdisciplinary teams improve communication skills, the dominant conception of technological functionality, as a synonym for success, creates unilateral actions from the engineers in the team without paying attention to power relationships that were generated [33].…”

“…For example, in K-12 and college education, the concept of social justice is related to the promotion of aspects like activism or social change where the students address the expert's role in and for the solution of technological problems due to needs of the intervened communities. In that sense, through problem-based learning (PBL), students simulate a situation where it is needed to solve a social problem such as shoes for people displaced by violence [27] or soap with certain characteristics in an African country [29]. This situation reproduces vertical power relations where engineers stills hold the power of knowledge.…”

“…In the case of the university stage, I analyzed six articles related to classroom interventions through Capstone Design Projects (CDP) or specific courses for the development of solutions aimed to achieve social justice, focused on the lack access to specific products, from a welfare approach to social problems, and its effects on particular products. The researchers were, for the most part, engineering instructors in areas such as mechanical engineering [29], IT Engineering [30], Building Engineering [31] or interdisciplinary groups where there are at least one engineer [32] [33] [34], who also looked for fostering interdisciplinary teamwork. For this, these investigations conceived the design from different approaches of user-centered design: 1. appropriate technology [33], 2. service-learning related to social intelligence design [30], 3. socio-technical systems [35], 4. innovation [32], or 5.…”

Systems Thinking Concepts and Applications for Engineering Leadership Development

“…Burleson, Butcher, Goodwin, Sharp, and Ruder [33] established the growing need for engineers to accommodate complex relationships between technological systems and the social systems in which they are used. Crawley, Malmqvist, Östlund, and Brodeur [34] emphasized the use of systems thinking skills in engineering, including societal and other concerns, with implications for leadership development.…”