Human-Centered Engineering: A Conversation with Professor Nathan Johnson
Editors from the BYU Design Review recently sat down with Professor Nathan Johnson, an associate professor in The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, with research areas in global sustainability and systems engineering. Below are a few short passages taken from the interview.
BDR: Good Afternoon, tell us a brief background about yourself and how you arrived at your current position.
From an early age growing up in the rural midwest I was focused on very human-centered challenges. My mother was a registered nurse; we volunteered for Meals on Wheels and other activities to support the community. However, by my mid-teens, I became interested in disaster recovery after a series of tornadoes destroyed nearby towns. I knew I wanted to serve some greater good, but I hadn’t quite defined it yet.
Pursuing an engineering degree at Iowa State University, and noting the midwest agricultural background, it was natural for me to move into renewable fuels. However, I realized that working in a laboratory was somewhat distant from humankind; and that is where my passion was. After a few years I transitioned into consumer products for emerging markets so I could have greater interaction with individuals.
As I developed my early career with a focus on biomass cooking stoves and lighting technologies, I realized that my mechanical engineering skillset alone was insufficient. There had to be more to products that people would enjoy and want to buy. Need inspired design is a misnomer, you don’t design for what someone needs but for what someone wants.
BDR: So, should we design for wants or should we design for needs?
The concepts of need and want, I believe, often get thought of as the same; but the reason why I make the distinct separation is that it is easy for an engineer to make assumptions about what another person needs.
Wants are inherently external things coming from others while needs are things we project upon others. We find ourselves saying “you need this” rather than “you want this.”
BDR: Is there some cognitive difference that makes it so the engineer doesn’t say “you want this?”
Vocabulary influences our process of thought (borrowing that line of thinking from philosopher Wittgenstein). Changing our wording and vocabulary helps us think in a different direction. It can be awkward to say “you want this” with information drawn fully from your assumptions.
Wants would often come through interaction or interpersonal engagement and that is not part of the problem solving process. We don’t educate or train professionals to understand want; they have needs and those are assumed.
There is a distinct culture between scientists and engineers. Engineers are inherently trained to make assumptions about things we don’t know. However, assumptions can be flat out wrong.
BDR: Okay, so tell us about the rest of the story of how you made it back to ASU?
As I finished my Ph.D., I focused on village energy systems. I was moving into electric power infrastructure and rural electrification. I went to work for a start-up called HOMER Energy during an NSF-funded postdoc to design microgrids for off-grid power systems. As I liked the business culture, I missed the ability to engage freely in more topics and with individuals that were coming into their own professions (students).
So, the university allowed my interests to go in a variety of directions and I could be entrepreneurial and academic at the same time. It was exciting to identify nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that had applications across several disciplines. It is really great to create science and take the applications and instantiate them in products.
BDR: Nathan, we know that you got an MS and Ph.D. in ME, but you also got a master’s in economics and anthropology. How much has that influenced the way you see the world?
Yes, an MS in International Development comprised of three specialties – economics, anthropology, and sociology. Each discipline was influential but sociology had the most direct application because social research methods offered a standardized process in which to gain an understanding of these consumer wants that were not available in the engineering literature.
Within anthropology, the greatest lessons came from cultural anthropology and ethnography. We came up with engineering ethnography - a way to rapidly gain similar perspectives on culture and viewpoints that guide decisions in life for using engineered systems (e.g., infrastructure, consumer products, fast-moving consumer goods). In brief, we see Actions and those actions are governed by Choices, and through deep interviews and participatory observation we can uncover the Metrics that guide choices and thereby understand the Value System guide the metrics upon which people make decisions.
BDR: Why did you choose to get those additional degrees?
I had a master’s at this point, but I was going to implement a few of my projects and review some others, and I saw that half had failed. I thought why? Technically they seemed like good ideas, but if your device is 50% more efficient, who cares if no one uses it? So I thought I needed to get the business side of it. I needed to see how products are used in a home and if there is a value system where people use certain products or not.
BDR: Systems engineering is a newer field, what is your best description of it? What is it all about?
A common way to view Systems Engineering is a shallow skillset across multiple specialties and then a deep vertical in the emphasis area of which you choose to pursue. That is a common thought, a rather simplistic definition. As I think about systems engineering, it is more so based on the premise that we shouldn’t allow our knowledge of a single technical specialty to constrain our creativity in realizing the potential of an idea. The quality of the outcome should not be limited by the vocabulary you currently know or have been trained on. If we limit the quality of our creativity and our innovation based upon the literature that we know or the degree behind our name, we will inherently not be able to realize the full potential of our ideas.
