An Olin College course incorporates principles of anthropology, teaching students to “watch, inquire, listen, and do.”
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
After Cindy, a Massachusetts woman in her 60s, lost part of her fingers following a medical catastrophe, rehabilitation engineers provided what seemed the perfect way to restore her abilities: a $90,000 robotic hand. This “marvel of engineering” could perform many of the manipulations of a natural hand, said Olin College Dean of Faculty Caitrin Lynch in a 2018 TEDx talk. But, she added, it could not give Cindy what she wanted most: her former everyday life, including writing Christmas cards by hand and putting on makeup.
What Cindy dubbed the “Darth Vader” hand proved too heavy, too hot, too large, and too unattractive to fit into her life. But thanks to an astute prosthetist who devised low-tech gizmos, Cindy is once again sending handwritten holiday notes and applying eyeliner unaided. This time, it’s with a bifurcated silicon sleeve that fits over the remains of her hand, allowing her to grasp a pen.
The human connection
For Lynch, Cindy’s circuitous path reflects not a failure to take advantage of topflight technology, but instead a triumph of “going WILD.” Lynch uses the acronym, which stands for “watch, inquire, listen, and do,” for the attitude she has been teaching to engineering students for 15 years. In addition to dean of faculty, Lynch is a professor of anthropology at Olin. She strives, she says, to “train engineers to think outside of a narrow, cool, whiz-bang technology” focus and instead to create solutions that match the recipient’s values and aspirations. WILD is Lynch’s distillation of her discipline’s technique of understanding people by observing their actions, asking about (and listening to) the reasons behind them, and only then suggesting interventions. Learning to “think like anthropologists,” she says in the TEDx talk, helps engineers “create designs that really matter.”
Engineering for Humanity (E4H), a course she team-teaches with mechanical engineering educator Ela Ben-Ur, gives students practical training “in this very integrated way” of understanding “what matters most to individuals” you want to partner with for design. It provides experience in both anthropological technique and engineering design, letting students work in an unfamiliar culture, as anthropologists do. The unfamiliar culture the instructors chose for their young students? Aging.
“Engineering is a tool for making things possible in our physical world,” says Ben-Ur. But “the what, why, and how of all we create in engineering is rooted in the human world.” She emphasizes that considerations of human aspirations, behaviors, and requirements are combined in any meaningful and successful engineering endeavor. “It’s easy to point out failed engineering outcomes where anthropology was absent—all the inventions we love to poke fun at.” The $90,000 Darth Vader hand might deserve a wink here.
For E4H students, “the bigger win” is the chance to get to “that why: their deeper motivation for engineering,” Ben-Ur says. They also gain “human connection across generations that will serve them in their experiences as engineers and as people.”
Goal Keepers
Through their local Council on Aging chapter, older adult volunteers participate in the course as community partners with the goal of aiding the students’ education. Teams of students each get to know a volunteer. The team explores that person’s goals, desires, values, and challenges, and then they collaborate to design something intended to improve the volunteer’s daily life in a concrete way. This partnership works very well, Lynch says, “because both parties think they’re helping the other.”
The students and community partners together go through the multiple steps of a design project: ideation, prototypes, revising, and then building. “By the end of the semester they’ve actually handed off a real something to their community partner.” But, she emphasizes, “we actually don’t frame it as a problem. We ask, ‘What are somebody’s goals?’” The students might explore social issues like loneliness and social engagement or physical issues like an inability to open cans of food because of arthritis.
The process starts with what Peg Wihtol, a septuagenarian who served as a community partner in 2021, calls “speed dating.” Following a busy career that included teaching, entrepreneurship, and volunteering, Wihtol spent two years as a full-time caregiver for her husband, who had both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. In December 2019, he entered assisted living, and then a nursing home, before he passed away from COVID in April 2020.
“Until January of 2021, I was pretty much alone,” Wihtol says. “It was very hard for me with nothing to use my mind on. I was getting very, very low.” Seeking socially distanced community work, she heard about the possibility of volunteering as a community partner with E4H. It seemed like a good opportunity to interact with people.
Sharing the Load
Wihtol’s class included three other community partners. They met groups of students online and eventually were each paired with a team of four or five students. Wihtol found “Team Peg,” as they called themselves, a congenial group who shared her interests in sailing and hiking.
“They started talking with me about what led me to live at home, why I wanted to stay here, and what the problems were,” she recalls. Before long, the group focused on a frequent and potentially dangerous challenge: carrying baskets of laundry between her first-floor bedroom and the washer and dryer on the second floor. “Going up isn’t too bad because I take the basket, put it a couple of stairs above me, grab the rail, walk up,” and repeat, she says. “But coming down, the basket is in front of me with its weight.” The stairs in her old house are steep, and trying to hold both the rail and the basket is not safe.
The students came up with various solutions. They even considered a dumbwaiter, but then dismissed the idea as too complicated and time-consuming a project for the one-semester course. “Another solution was putting everything in a pillowcase and throwing it down the stairs,” Wihtol says, but that would have endangered the lamp and furniture at the bottom. Later, while contemplating craft supplies that Olin had sent her, Wihtol began “thinking of something that could come down the stair rail.” She bent a pipe cleaner over a paper towel roll and, holding it at an angle, attached a bag to the pipe cleaner’s other end. Such a contraption, she realized, could slide down with the weight “supported by the railing and not by me.”
Thus began what became known as the stair rail slider. The students “took it from my very basic idea and had it all fleshed out, [trying] several different iterations.” The group worked both over Zoom and in person. One student who received an early vaccine went to the house and gave the others a virtual tour. The students also did a lot of testing on the stairs outside their lab at Olin.
Ultimately, using polycarbonate and a 3D printer, they fabricated a sleeve to fit over the railing and a board with a row of hooks that attaches to it. The lip of the laundry basket fits over the hooks, and spacers hold it in place. Swimming pool noodles on the board’s back keep it straight and protect the wall from scuffs. Stops at the top and bottom of the stairs control the basket’s movement. Wihtol can attach the full basket at the top of the stairs, let it slide down the rail to the bottom, and walk safely behind.
For Wihtol, however, the course was about far more than moving laundry safely. It gave her “something new and interesting to invest in and concentrate on” during her mourning period and the isolation of COVID. She also experienced “the pleasure of working with young, ambitious, and caring students, [which] has renewed my soul and reengaged my brain.”
A Whole New Worldview
For students, too, the course produces much more than technical solutions. “Your worldview changes a lot when you work with someone whose world is completely different from yours,” says Toni Saylor, an Olin graduate who took the course. Not only did she learn to “see how someone else is experiencing the world,” but also “how houses are not really designed for people with differing abilities.”
For Saylor and the other students on her team, that someone was Bob, a man who shared a “typical Massachusetts split-level home” with his daughter and baby granddaughter. The house had two flights of stairs that lacked railings. A problem hip forced him to use a walker or crutches to get around, and several times a day he struggled to climb the stairs with crutches to see the baby or to shower.
“After a whole lot of talking with Bob and determining what some of his daily challenges were, we decided that the most compelling and life-changing [intervention] would be to help him with the stairs….Going down was definitely the scariest,” Saylor says.
The students determined that for Bob to climb without crutches, the best solution was a railing. With room for only one, they decided to place it on the side where Bob put his weight on descent. “A railing is a pretty standard thing and you don’t need an engineer to install one,” Saylor notes. But faculty members encouraged pursuing this sort of unexceptional, low-tech solution because the course focuses on learning to uncover and fill individual needs, not inventing new technologies. The team did, however, apply the engineering process to create the railing, developing many prototypes to find the one best suited to Bob’s needs and, through testing, determining the right nonstandard height. Then, because they lacked qualifications for the installation, “we managed to get a work crew to volunteer their time.”
The course had a profound effect. It not only bettered Bob’s daily life, but the focus on human-centered design also strongly influenced Saylor’s profession and career. When she neared graduation as a mechanical engineer, she says she “realized pretty quickly that engineers weren’t being hired to understand their users. No one was hiring mechanical engineers to do user-centered design work. I knew I wanted that in my life.” This led her to earn a master’s degree from the University of Washington’s human-centered design and engineering program. Working now as a human experience researcher, she hopes and believes the field is beginning to change.
A community partner once observed, Ben-Ur recalls, that many “engineers are into the things…, but the focus of this class is people.” Over the years, E4H has produced an array of useful outcomes—a cane modified to aid in getting in and out of a car, a device that brings a dropped cane to its user’s hand, a rack that lets a wheelchair-using shopper carry grocery bags comfortably—and also a stream of engineers eager to improve the world by going WILD.
Beryl Lieff Benderly is a Washington-based freelance writer and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Design by Nicola Nittoli