Engineering with an Impact
It’s 2022, and a young college undergraduate entering his third semester in college remains completely befuddled about what to do with his life. There are too many opinions, options, and passions that don’t seem to coincide. That was me – I was that confused student. I decided to start exploring Mechanical Engineering at BYU but wasn’t quite satisfied. I’ve learned that I take a lot of satisfaction in making a real impact in other people’s lives, so when a friend recommended the documentary “Period, End of Sentence.”, I was hooked [1]. After watching, I realized I could be an engineer with an impact.
The short documentary covers the story of an engineer and a group of women who helped shift cultural perspectives and provide jobs for women in their rural community, sixty kilometers outside of New Delhi. In this part of India, there is a strong taboo culture surrounding women’s menstruation and a lack of proper hygiene products. Men don’t know what it is, believing it is a disease, and the women are even hesitant to discuss the topic. Women and girls rotate out their skirts as often as they can but lack resources to maintain hygiene when they have their cycle, keeping them from attending school when they are younger and keeping them out of places of religious worship until their cycle ends.
Period. End of Sentence. A Netflix documentary
Surrounded by religious significance and societal stigmas, the group takes on these challenges through entrepreneurship, engineering, and a desire to change their circumstance. The engineer invented a “low-cost sanitary napkin machine” that produces pads at a cheap price while being easy to manufacture. The group purchases a storefront and starts a business advertising and selling these new pads. Women are instructed to be able to make them independently and are wholly responsible for the marketing and finances. In rapid time, these women take pride in being business owners and a cheaper, more accessible product is readily available compared to local markets.
Reading this as a college student struggling to find direction, I was instantly inspired. That was the dream to me, to take my natural talents and passions and combine them into goodness for others. During my time at Brigham Young University, I’ve come across many ways to accomplish that goal, and a tool that has changed how I view developing solutions is the Social Impact Cycle from the Ballard Center [2].
The BYU Ballard Center Social Impact Cycle [2]
This is a set of tools that enhanced my way of thinking as an engineer and helped me pursue the world of engineering for sustainable development. I’d invite you to study it yourself and glean more than what I discuss here about social impact. Let me share with you a couple principles and practices that helped me think deeper about lasting change.
Love the Problem, not the Solution
The majority of engineering education is focused on gaining technical skills. Someone needs to know how to build and design any machine or product, understanding the complexities ranging from the material chosen to the dynamic interactions of each moving part.
Loving the problem, or being more focused on understanding what I want to solve, lets me detach myself from solutions I imagine, and gain a deeper insight into the change I want to make. Using the documentary as an example, an outsider to the community could easily identify that delivering mass amounts of menstruation products would be of benefit. However, they may fail to consider how the waste from wrappers may impact the community, or that the solution only provided a temporary relief, rather than providing a sustainable solution.
An enlightening exercise for me was writing an issue brief on “Food Insecurity Amongst College Students in the United States.” This is a research paper that takes the time to define key terms, context questions, contributing factors, negative consequences, and best practices surrounding the issue. What’s fascinating is that the entire paper is purely research of the problem, and only at the very end did I briefly discuss current solutions that colleges are practicing. The paper did not propose any new solutions. Now, not everyone needs to write a paper every time they want to solve a problem, but researching to uncover the context, causes, and negative effects of a problem allowed me to understand that issue intimately. By taking an intense research perspective on issues I want to solve as an engineer, solutions start to form themselves for me, especially when I’m aware of what causes a problem and its effects that can be addressed. It directs me to work on lasting change in the life of someone else.
Co-Create Intervention
A significant crossover between engineering and the Ballard’s Center Social impact cycle is the process by which a solution is designed, even though social ventures may not always produce a technical product like engineering does. Some similarities are understanding what the beneficiary needs, features to be included, and redesigning where necessary. In learning about the social impact cycle, I gained a keen understanding that the stakeholder is not just a benefactor but can and should be a direct partner in the design process. In tandem, I gained the capacity to work through iterative solutions of all kinds and let myself be uncomfortable while trying ideas that I never would have considered and being wrong about the ones I was more partial to.
In one of my classes, we were randomly paired with a partner and asked to solve a simple problem: “How do you get more out of what you read?” It was a fantastic question, especially as a college student. We went through a couple of short interviews focused on understanding each partner’s weaknesses or difficulties while hearing desires for outcomes. Then we proceeded to make doodles and sketches of potential solutions -- specifically trying to give each a unique approach, and then one last interview of the coalesced information to idealize a final product. Then, in presenting our result, we could only use basic, elementary craft materials to present a rudamentary design.
Even though the process was quick and messy, it so clearly demonstrated the power of having a one-on-one conversation with a potential user and having their feedback every step of the way. I do acknowledge that this is a common practice in design– no one wants to get to the end product and realize they were missing a requirement along the way– but the process was unique because it showed how often I can and should talk to the consumer, even though it might seem redundant, and how willing I can be to accept a variety of solutions outside of my comfort zone.
What still stays with me about this exercise was not what I was able to give to my peer, nor what they gifted me, but the sound understanding we mutually had about how the same problem asked for contrasting needs in both of us. It truly guided us to know what would be the most impactful for the other. Their idea stunned me, quite frankly. I even asked to take the prototype home because I was so excited about it.
The reason why I’m writing about this is to again illustrate engineering with an impact and all the work that can be done before discovering an answer. Even outside my daily routines of assignments and classes, I can tune in just a little more to ask a few more questions about worries that my roommates or peers might have, love their problem more, and spend time theorizing with them about the change they might want. In my career as an undergraduate and professional, I want as much as possible of what I do to have lasting change for good, and I hope what I’ve discussed today will help you do the same.
References:
[1] Period: End of Sentence, YouTube. (2020, April 17). Period. end of sentence. | full feature | netflix. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrm2pD0qofM
[2] BYU Ballard Center Social impact cycle. Used with permission from the Ballard Center. https://marriott.byu.edu/ballard/
