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Thesis/Dissertation Acceptance

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Is approved by the final examining committee:

To the best of my knowledge and as understood by the student in the Thesis/Dissertation Agreement, Publication Delay, and Certification Disclaimer (Graduate School Form 32), this thesis/dissertation adheres to the provisions of Purdue University’s “Policy of Integrity in Research” and the use of copyright material.

Approved by Major Professor(s):

Approved by: Head of the Departmental Graduate Program Date

Andrea Mazzurco

Methods To Facilitate Community Participation in Humanitarian Engineering Projects: Laying the Foundations of a Learnign Platform.

Doctor of Philosophy

Brent Jesiek Carla Zoltowski Chair

Robin Adams

Jon Leydens

Alice Pawley

Brent Jesiek

David Radcliffe 7/21/2016

METHODS TO FACILITATE COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN HUMANITARIAN ENGINEERING PROJECTS: LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR

A LEARNING PLATFORM

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty

of Purdue University

by Andrea Mazzurco

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

August 2016 Purdue University

West Lafayette, Indiana

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Published by ProQuest LLC ( ). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author.

ProQuest Number:

10172873

2016

To Fernanda, whose undying love and support has made this dissertation possible.

To my parents, whose unconditional love has supported me my entire life. To all of those who wish to practice engineering in a way that benefits underserved

citizens.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As I come to the close of my time as a Ph.D. student, I am fully aware that all my successes as a student, scholar, educator, and person have been made possible by the support of so many people that stood by me during my academic and life journey. I thank my advisor, Brent Jesiek. Brent has welcomed me in his research group in a difficult time in my life, when I felt I had lost my way and did not know where I belonged. Since the beginning, he made feel at home, making life away from family, friends, and love much easier. He nurtured and supported me for over four years, allowing me to grow as a student, educator, and scholar. I will always remember the times when he would read all my work even while travelling in an airplane. His open door policy allowed me to meet with him anytime I needed to discuss anything, from research, to courses, and life. He always advocated for me, enabling me to obtain many awards and continue my professional career. Brent is not just a mentor to me, but he is also one of the dearest friends I have in USA and I will miss his companionship a lot when I will move abroad.

I would like to thank my other committee members as well: Robin Adams, Jon Leydens, Alice Pawley, and Carla Zoltowski. I feel lucky and blessed to have worked with such wonderful and supportive people. Thank you to Robin for your continual

insight into research methodologies. Thank you to Jon for your support in all phases of my research and professional career, and for always chatting with me in Italian, which helped me feel always less homesick. I especially thank you for always being able to arrange your schedule to meet with me and attend committee meetings, especially given the time differences and your busy schedule. Thank you to Alice for being my critical friend, always pushing me to meet the highest standards of research quality. Thank you to Carla for supporting me along the way and for sharing your amazing research and design expertise with me. Thank you all for your support. I could have not made it without your guidance and assistance.

I also want to acknowledge the 14 participants in this study, without whom I would not be able to conclude my dissertation. I hope this dissertation can support you in your future endeavors. I would like to thank my engineering education Ph.D. student colleagues for their friendship and informal support. I specifically would like to thank: James Huff, Julia Thompson, Natascha Trellinger, Cole Joslyn, Canek Phillips, Genisson Coutinho, Mel Chua, Tasha Zepherin, Qin Zhu, and Neha Choudhary. Moreover, I would like to thank the entire GEEC research group for their support. I would also like to acknowledge Purdue ENE faculty who supported through my academic career: Ruth Streveler, Allison Godwin, David Radcliffe, Jennifer DeBoer, Heidi Diefes-Dux, Morgan Hynes, Muhsin Menekse, and Matthew Ohland. I would like to especially thank Mary Pilotte for always believing in me, supporting me in my First Year Engineering experience, and being one of my greatest champions.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their amazing support in this journey. To my parents, thank you for your continuous encouragement and for always believing in me. To Fernanda, thank you for your love and for always being next to me. Although the many difficulties of our long distance relationship, you never questioned my choice to pursue a Ph.D. and always have supported me in my academic and professional career. Thank you for choosing to follow me wherever we end up being. I look forward to spending the rest of my life at your side.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................................. x LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... xi ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... xii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1 1.1 Background and Research Questions....................................................................... 1 1.2 My Personal Journey................................................................................................ 4 1.3 Structure of Dissertation ........................................................................................ 10 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................... 13 2.1 Overview ................................................................................................................ 13 2.2 What is Humanitarian Engineering? ...................................................................... 13 2.3 Brief History of Engineers’ Involvement in Humanitarianism .............................. 15 2.4 Humanitarian Engineering in US Engineering Education ..................................... 19 2.5 Important Considerations in HE ............................................................................ 23 2.6 Participation Frameworks ...................................................................................... 25

2.6.1 Who Makes Decisions?............................................................................... 27 2.6.2 How Does Information Flow? .................................................................... 28 2.6.3 How Much Weight Does Information Have on Decisions? ....................... 28 2.6.4 What Roles Does Each Counterpart Play in Decision-Making? ................ 29 2.6.5 How Does Participation Change During the Design Project? .................... 30 2.6.6 What Methods Could Be Used to Involve Communities? .......................... 32

2.7 Challenges to choose the appropriate degree of participation ............................... 34 CHAPTER 3. METHODOLOGY .............................................................................. 38

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Page 3.1 Research Objective and Questions......................................................................... 38 3.2 Research Design Overview .................................................................................... 39 3.3 Phase 1a: Qualitative Systematized Review .......................................................... 42

3.3.1 Selection Criteria ........................................................................................ 43 3.3.2 Search and Selection Process ...................................................................... 46 3.3.3 Reliability of Selection Process .................................................................. 49 3.3.4 Analysis and Synthesis of Selected Papers ................................................. 50

3.4 Phase 1b: Classification of Methods ...................................................................... 51 3.4.1 Collecting the Final Set of Methods ........................................................... 51 3.4.2 Developing Classification System .............................................................. 55

3.5 Phase 2: Interviews of Practitioners ....................................................................... 64 3.5.1 Selection, Recruitment, and Profiles of Participants. ................................. 65 3.5.2 Elicitation of Practitioners’ Experience ...................................................... 71 3.5.3 Interview Analysis ...................................................................................... 73

CHAPTER 4. GUIDING PRINCIPLES, METHODS, AND COMPETENCIES FOR PARTICIPATORY HUMANITARIAN ENGINEERING PROJECTS .......................... 77 4.1 Guiding Principles ................................................................................................. 78

4.1.1 Collaborating With on-the-Ground Partners ............................................... 78 4.1.2 Harnessing Local Resources and Expertise ................................................ 80 4.1.3 Considering Ethics, and Social Justice ....................................................... 82 4.1.4 Building Trusting Relationships ................................................................. 83 4.1.5 Creating Diverse and Multidisciplinary Teams .......................................... 84

4.2 Methods to Involve Communities .......................................................................... 84 4.2.1 Social Science Research Methods .............................................................. 85 4.2.2 Design Tools ............................................................................................... 86 4.2.3 Participatory Methods ................................................................................. 87 4.2.4 Stakeholder Identification Methods ............................................................ 89 4.2.5 Evaluation and Decision-Making Tools ..................................................... 90 4.2.6 Self-Awareness Tools ................................................................................. 91

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Page 4.2.7 Miscellaneous ............................................................................................. 92

4.3 Competencies ......................................................................................................... 93 4.3.1 Mindsets, Beliefs, Attitudes, and Self-Awareness ...................................... 93 4.3.2 Ability to Navigate Cross-Cultural Differences ......................................... 94 4.3.3 Communication and Listening Skills .......................................................... 95

4.4 Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 96 CHAPTER 5. PASSIVE, CONSULTATIVE, AND CO-CONSTRUCTIVE METHODS…………… ................................................................................................... 98 5.1 Dimension 1: Levels of Community Participation .............................................. 100 5.2 Dimension 2: Project Phase ................................................................................. 102

5.2.1 Problem Framing and Planning Methods ................................................. 102 5.2.2 Information Gathering Methods ............................................................... 106 5.2.3 Solution Development Methods ............................................................... 112

5.3 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................ 115 CHAPTER 6. BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF USING PARTICIPATORY METHODS………………. ............................................................................................ 119 6.1 Participants’ Familiarity With the Methods ......................................................... 121 6.2 Positive Aspects ................................................................................................... 126 6.3 Negative Aspects ................................................................................................. 133

6.3.1 Practical Challenges .................................................................................. 134 6.3.2 Communication Challenges ...................................................................... 138 6.3.3 Cultural Challenges ................................................................................... 144 6.3.4 Ethical Challenges .................................................................................... 147

6.4 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................ 148 CHAPTER 7. THE SOCIOTECHNICAL NATURE OF HUMANITARIAN ENGINEERING... .......................................................................................................... 151 7.1 The Nature of Humanitarian Engineering............................................................ 152 7.2 Building Trusted Relationships............................................................................ 155

Page 7.2.1 The Importance and Benefits of Building Trust with Community Partners….. .............................................................................................................. 155 7.2.2 Strong Project Partner ............................................................................... 161 7.2.3 Social Interactions ..................................................................................... 163

7.3 Using an Asset/Strengths-Based Approach ......................................................... 166 7.3.1 Local Expertise ......................................................................................... 169

7.4 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................ 171 CHAPTER 8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ............................................... 174 8.1 Discussion of Findings ......................................................................................... 176

8.1.1 Discussion of Findings Related to RQ1 .................................................... 176 8.1.2 Discussion of Findings Related to RQ2 .................................................... 186 8.1.3 Integrating Phase 1 and 2 .......................................................................... 191 8.1.4 Appropriateness of Methods ..................................................................... 195

8.2 Broader Considerations ........................................................................................ 197 8.2.1 Trust and Social Interactions .................................................................... 197 8.2.2 Asset-Based Community Development .................................................... 199 8.2.3 The Sociotechnical Nature of Humanitarian Engineering Practice .......... 203 8.2.4 Students’ Involvement .............................................................................. 204

8.3 Dissemination Plan and Research-to-Practice Ideas ............................................ 208 8.4 Future Research ................................................................................................... 210 8.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 212 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 213 APPENDICES Appendix A: Search Strings for Qualitative Systematized Review................................ 233 Appendix B: List of Collected Methods ......................................................................... 237 Appendix C: Possible Participation Framework for Classification of Methods ............. 248 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 255

LIST OF TABLES Table Page Table 3.1 Project Activities and Outcomes ................................................................. 41 Table 3.2. Example of Titles of Papers that Were Discarded ..................................... 48 Table 3.3. Sources Obtained Through the QSR Process ............................................ 52 Table 3.4. Sources of Methods Obtained by Snowballing From the QSR Sources.... 54 Table 3.5. Assignment of Methods for Review .......................................................... 64 Table 3.6. Key Characteristics of Study Participants. ................................................ 69 Table 5.1. Problem Framing and Planning Methods ................................................ 103 Table 5.2. Information Gathering Methods .............................................................. 107 Table 5.3. Solution Development Methods .............................................................. 113 Table 6.1. Codes and Short Examples for Each Code .............................................. 120 Table 6.1. Number of Transcripts Coded Under the Five Codes for Each Method 122 Table 7.1. Code and Associated Examples ............................................................... 152 Appendix Table Table A.1. Search Strings, Their ID Numbers, and Number of Papers Found ......... 233 Table A2. Number of Paper Discarded and Kept at Each Selection Step ................ 235 Table B.1: Levels of Communities’ Participation in Humanitarian Engineering Projects ................................................................................................................................... 254

LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page Figure 2.1. Example of Evaluation of Participation in a Project. ............................... 32 Figure 3.1. Flowchart of Process to Develop the Classification System .................... 56 Figure 3.3. Example of Application of Color-Coding on an IDEO Method .............. 60 Figure 3.2. Legend for Color-Coding Scheme ............................................................ 60 Figure 5.1. Two-Dimensional Use-Inspired Framework to Classify Methods ......... 100 Figure 5.2. Levels of Community Participation........................................................ 101 Figure 8.1. Template of Information Sheet ............................................................... 192 Figure 8.2. Info Sheet for Wealth Ranking ............................................................... 193 Figure 8.3. Info Sheet for Participatory Mapping ..................................................... 194

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ABSTRACT Mazzurco, Andrea, Ph.D., Purdue University, August 2016. Methods to Facilitate Community Participation in Humanitarian Engineering Projects: Laying the Foundation for a Learning Platform. Major Professor: Brent K. Jesiek. Humanitarian engineering (HE) is a new interdisciplinary field that is rapidly emerging worldwide. Many not-for-profit organizations such as Engineers Without Borders, Practical Action, and International Development Enterprise have been flourishing with the goal of providing technological solutions to those who need them the most. In engineering programs across the U.S., HE, service-learning, community engagement, and similar programs are gaining popularity because they offer an efficient way to meet ABET accreditation criteria, while also teaching valuable technical and professional skills to engineering students. However, the cultural, social, and political differences among communities and engineers often add degrees of difficulty that cannot be properly addressed using typical engineering problem solving approaches. Consequently, engineers must utilize problem framing and solving methods that meet the twofold requirements of involving community members at each stage of a project and integrating communities’ needs, desires, assets, cultures, social norms, and politics in the proposed solutions. Historically, engineers have borrowed methods from other disciplines,

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including design and anthropology, as the HE field still lacks a well-established and coherent repertoire of field-tested methods that are readily accessible by less-experienced humanitarian engineers.

To address these gaps, this dissertation utilizes a Scholarship of Integration approach to: (1) collect and classify methods that have been used in (or proposed for) humanitarian engineering projects, and (2) investigate the conditions (e.g., philosophical commitments, culture of the community, engineers’ skills, and others) under which the use of specific methods is appropriate and community participation is best facilitated. In the first phase of this research, I used a systematized qualitative review to gather 64 methods from relevant engineering and related fields publications. Then I iteratively analyzed and compared the methods to generate a use-inspired framework classifying the 64 methods based on two main dimensions: the level of community participation and the purpose of the methods. In the second phase, I interviewed 14 practitioners who have participated in several humanitarian engineering projects. The thematic analysis of the practitioners’ personal experiences revealed benefits and challenges associated with the methods, as well as broader emergent themes such as the importance of building trusted relationships with project partners and taking an asset-based rather than a needs-based approach to design.

This dissertation contributes to research engineering thinking and knowing in the context of engineering and community engagement by providing a framework that can guide both engineering students and professional in designing culturally sustainable solutions with underserved communities locally and internationally.

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background and Research Questions Many scholars have criticized engineers’ involvement with warfare and corporations (Blue, Levine, and Nieusma, 2013; Riley, 2008) and advocate for engineers to work toward the improvement of marginalized communities (Blue et al., 2013; Lucena, 2013b; Riley, 2008). Additionally, humanitarian engineering (HE), global and local service learning, and similar courses and programs have increasingly appeared in U.S. engineering schools (Schneider, Lucena, & Leydens, 2009), in part because they allow institutions to meet accreditation requirements such as the ability to “design a system to meet desired needs… to function in multidisciplinary teams… to understand professional and ethical responsibility.. [and] to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global context” (ABET, 2004, as quoted by Schneider et al., 2009, p. 44). Furthermore, scholars have shown that, in addition to meeting ABET criteria, HE courses and programs offer the opportunity for students to learn many other valuable skills, attitudes, and forms of knowledge (Huff, Zoltowski, Oakes, 2016; Litchfield and Javernick-Will, 2014; Maloney, Dent, and Karp, 2013).

However, while there is broad consensus on the benefits of local community engagement programs in engineering schools, scholars express contrasting views regarding the placements of students in communities abroad (Vandersteen, Baillie, &

Hall, 2009). For instance, Riley (2007) criticized courses and programs with an abroad component, because she argues that international humanitarian projects can too easily become a form of colonialism. Likewise, Eprechet (2004) fears that “work-study programs contribute to the very kinds of underdevelopment and colonial-style North- South relations that they are intended to critically address” (Eprechet, 2004, as cited by Vandersteen et al., 2009). Additionally, many humanitarian projects have failed over the years because they do not properly involve community members and do not take into account the cultural, social, historical, and political realities of the communities where projects are undertaken. This creates possible tensions between student and community needs, which often is resolved in favor of students’ learning, often leaving communities with inappropriate and unusable solutions (Riley, 2007).

To address this tension and to make sure that communities also benefit from these programs, many scholars have provided elaborate frameworks and philosophical commitments to inform the practice of humanitarian engineering projects. For instance, Amadei et al (2009) published a model for Sustainable Humanitarian Engineering projects. In this model, 10 guiding principles are provided to ensure the success and sustainability of humanitarian projects. The principles stress the importance of following ethical and professional codes and collaborating with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. Another model was proposed by Leydens and Lucena (2014), which integrates notions of social justice. In their framework, they provide six SJ criteria to guide humanitarian and other types of engineering practice: 1) listening contextually, 2) identifying structural conditions, 3) acknowledging political agency/mobilizing power, 4) increasing opportunities and resources, 5) reducing imposed risks and harms, and 6)

enhancing human capabilities (Leydens & Lucena, 2014, p. 6). In addition to these two frameworks, there are many others that I review later in this dissertation.

Yet while the humanitarian engineering and similar literature is rich with models and frameworks, there are only few field guides that can help translate the principles into practice. For instance, Baillie et al. (2010) provide processes to assess needs and feasibility of transferring technology into a disadvantaged community. Mihelcic et al. (2009) developed a field guide for environmental engineers working in developing countries, which provides a set of methods for interacting with communities and instructions related to specific technologies. IDEO’s (2014) human-centered design toolkit is also often cited as a practical guide for humanitarian engineering and similar projects. Casting a wider net, useful resources can also be found in the international development literature. Yet, the extant literature is still missing a comprehensive repertoire of field-tested methods, including how existing methods might be compared, contrasted, and integrated, making them available and useful to both novices and experts engaged in humanitarian engineering projects.

To fill this gap and address shortcomings of current humanitarian engineering projects, this dissertation lays the foundations for a learning platform or a toolkit, which students, faculty, and professionals involved with HE projects can consult to learn about appropriate methods that may facilitate community participation while at the same time achieving many of the tasks required during an HE design project. The research questions that will allow me to meet the aforementioned three objectives are:

1. What are the key characteristics of specific design methods that have been used/proposed in the HE and related literature?

a. How do they differ in terms of community participation? b. How do they differ in terms of their function? c. In what phase of the design process are the methods being used? d. What other salient characteristics distinguish one method from another?

2. What are other conditions (e.g., philosophical commitments, culture of the community, engineers’ skills and mindsets, and others) that are not specific to any design stage, but may facilitate meaningful community participation?

1.2 My Personal Journey The challenges related to humanitarian engineering projects and the inevitable conflict between students’ and communities’ needs have led many scholars to strongly criticize and oppose humanitarian engineering project. Those against international placements tend to favor engagement in one’s own community, as clearly expressed in Illich’s (a Catholic priest and theologian with experience in Latin America) talk to participants of the 1968 Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico:

If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you. And it is

profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as ‘good,’ a ‘sacrifice’ and ‘help’”. (Illich, 1968, italics added).

A similar conclusion, although less accusatory, can be found in VanderSteen’s (2008) concluding words of his doctoral dissertation titled Humanitarian Engineering in the Engineering Curriculum:

Initially, I was excited about this project because of the opportunities to design appropriate technologies for needy international communities. While this excitement does still exist, I am much more leery; during the process I learned a lot about technology in society, the need to challenge structures, the need to work in one’s own community, and the dangers of international placements (VanderSteen, 2008, p. 288, italics added).

The above commentaries and the numerous failed projects (Mazzurco and Jesiek, 2014) make international humanitarian engineering (HE) a controversial subject. The history of engineers involved in humanitarian work show that to ‘deliver progress’ (as stated by Roberto de Marca (2014), IEEE president, at the 2014 Global Humanitarian Technology Conference) to ‘underdeveloped’ communities might not be the best idea after all, and that we should oppose anybody who wants to participate in such projects. We should work in our own communities or at least with people that speak the same language (Illich, 1968). Given these negative factors related to HE, it would seem crazy to do a dissertation on HE. So why am I focusing my dissertation on HE? And most importantly, why am I not already back in Italy designing for my own people? While I strongly oppose the idea of ‘deliver progress’ as expressed by the IEEE president, I find many reasons to consider HE a worthy field of practice. One of those

reasons stems from my own difficulty in aligning with the ‘design in your own community’ idea. The advocates of this idea seem to use a very narrow definition of one’s own community, implying that one’s own community should be determined by one’s native language and passport, or more specifically by where one lives. If we accept this definition of community, we then have to accept ‘linguistic determinism’, which states that the language we speak and the culture in which we grew up determine who we are (see explanation in Lustig and Koester, 1996). However, this theory excludes the concept of agency and the understanding that we have the power to change and transform who we are (Freire, 1970). While there is no doubt that the culture we grew up in and the language we speak influences and sometimes dominates how we understand the world and creates conflicts when encountering people from other places, we have the potential to learn to be in harmony with communities in which we are not native, to learn from each other, and to positively influence each other. Furthermore, in today’s globalized society, hardly anybody clearly fits in one specific community and we are usually part of many communities, although we might still feel more at ease in our own native country or city or neighborhood than in other places. For instance, this is especially my case.

I was born in Milan, northern Italy, but my father is from the northeast and my mother is from Sicily. Although I was mostly influenced by the northern culture, I also acquired some aspects of the Southern Italian culture. This makes me belong partially to both Northern and Southern Italian communities, which means I do not really belong to either of them. Additionally, I come from a middle-class family and, thanks to my parents, I have never experienced economic disadvantages or a lack of support, which means as a privileged individual I do not belong to the lower socio-economic classes in Italy.

Furthermore, I have already spent such a considerable amount of time in the USA (six years total) that I have the same tax-return rate of any US citizen earing my same salary. While at the beginning it was hard to adapt to the US lifestyle and there are still many things that I do not like and I refuse to accept, I came to appreciate many aspects of US culture and to incorporate many aspects of it in my own lifestyle.

This experience changed me so much that when I hang out with friends from my youth, I feel like an outsider. They are not ‘my community’ anymore. To complicate things even more, my wife is Brazilian. In the almost three years we have been dating, I learned much about Brazilian culture and incorporated it in my own lifestyle. Now I can say I am a hybrid Italian-United Statesman-Brazilian, half engineer, half social scientist, middle-class-born, Christian-raised atheist/Buddhist-by-choice individual. Moreover, as I became the hybrid that I am now, I know that I can learn to be in harmony with poor or disadvantaged communities. Thus, I focus my dissertation on ways to improve engineering practice for the advancement of the wellbeing of disadvantaged communities, even if they are not my own community.

However, believing that anybody can easily become part of any community and work for their well-being is naïve. The process that brought me to become the ‘hybrid’ that I am now and to belong to so many different communities was long and not easy. I had to learn many new things, to challenge my beliefs, and I made many mistakes. This is no different from doing HE projects. However, if humanitarian engineers fail to learn and continue making the same mistakes (see Mazzurco & Jesiek, 2014), the consequences can be catastrophic and humanitarian workers will cause more harm than good (see for instance Dambisa Moyo, 2009, Dead Aid). If humanitarian engineers want to make

developing countries their own community and to produce sustainable solutions, they have to learn to “shut up and listen” (Sirolli, 2012). They must become ‘searchers’ who do not “know the answers in advance” (Easterly, 2006). This searcher mindset is in fact what distinguishes expert designers from novices (Crismond and Adams, 2012).

Once I understood the importance of learning and listening through my own experiences and the aforementioned scholarly work, I aligned myself with Vandersteen, Baillie, and Hall’s (2009) interviewees, who believed that international HE “can work with the right attitude and dialogue” (p. 35). I thus began a quest to find what at that time I believed was the right way of learning, framing, and solving problems in HE projects. I began from Paulo Freire (1970)’s work which guided me to participatory action research and Chambers’ (1994) Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). I then learned about human- centered design (HCD) from IDEO’s toolkit, from Zoltowski, Oakes, and Cardella’s (2010) work, and by being a co-advisor for EPICS for one semester. I also learned how the well-being framework (see Gouch and McGregor, 2007) could be applied to engineering design thanks to Nelson (2012). I read about the Appropriate Technology movement initiated by Shumacher’s influential book Small is Beautiful (1973). I discovered the value-sensitive design approach that has been used in African healthcare (Walton & DeRenzi, 2009). I dreamed (and still dream) to use photovoice (Wang and Burris, 1999) as an instrument to assess needs and as a vehicle for advocacy and self- determination. I scrutinized Amadei, Sandekian, and Thomas’s (2009) model for sustainable HE that is very much aligned with the appropriate technology movement. I discovered the importance of taking an asset-based approach thanks to Mathie and Cunningham (2001), who also taught me the importance of recognizing that users possess

the right “to participate, decide, and even reject [an HE] project or intervention” (Lucena, 2013 p. 810). I took a class on Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to learn what it means to evaluate the environmental sustainability of a product. More recently, I became passionate about the engineering for social justice approach suggested by Leydens and Lucena (2014). Finally, once I read all of the aforementioned resources, I began comparing them, and I found that they had one thing in common; they all appeared to be a possible right way to solve the humanitarian challenge. My quest for the right way ended nowhere (or in too many places) and I felt lost until I read Hussain (2010).

Sofia Hussain’s (2010) work is probably the most transparent report of an HE or similar project that I have read during my quest for the right way. In her 2010 work, she does not focus only on her successes, but she is transparent on all the challenges and the things that she had to change to succeed. The goal of her project was to develop leg prostheses by including marginalized children in every single step and every single decision of her project. However, the local conditions did not allow her to include children as she wished, and many times she had to adapt. She even leveraged the local hierarchical social structure that goes against the principles of participatory design. If instead of adapting she had been strictly loyal to the participatory design principles, she would have done much more harm than good.

In fact, this is exactly what many international aid workers had failed to do in the past, thus inspiring publication of the edited book Participation: The New Tyranny (Cooke and Kothatari, 2001). The authors of this book strongly criticize Chambers’ (1994) Participatory Rural Appraisal, especially pointing out that participatory methods “silence or exclude others that have advantages participatory methods cannot provide” (Lucena,

2013, p. 809) and override local functioning dynamics. This problem is labeled as the Tyranny of the method (Cooke and Kothatari, 2001; Lucena, 2013). However, what the critiques of Chamber’s work failed to realize is that if PRA risks to be tyrannical by imposing itself as the right and only way, then any other approach can be potentially a tyranny if it is deemed to be the right and only way. Engineering for social justice, HCD, asset-based, appropriate technology, and all the others are blueprints that need judicious responsiveness to specific conditions to be successful. As observed by Hussain, Sanders, and Streinert (2012) in relation to participatory design:

In South Africa there is a strong tradition for community participation and collective decision making in communities, thus, it was fairly easy for researchers to gather participants from different levels of the community and together form a common vision for the project. In India, on the other hand, a bottom-up approach did not work […] due to the hierarchical structure of the country with strong government involvement in community issues, a tradition that can be traced back to British colonial rule (p. 93).

Thus, humanitarian engineers and proposers of HE blueprints should be able to “challenge, but not reject systematically, the governing mentalities that shape what is ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘true’” (Nieusma, 2004, p.23) so that the appropriate methods could be used (or adapted) for the appropriate situation.

1.3 Structure of Dissertation The first chapter of this dissertation presented the research problem for this project, including a discussion of my personal journey that led me to formulate and answer the

proposed research questions. In the introduction, I take the reader into a journey through my struggles and my resolutions. I do this to increase the trustworthiness of my research and demonstrate the sincerity of my intentions (Tracy, 2010). The second chapter is my literature review. The goal of this chapter is to show readers why my study is necessary and important. I will begin by discussing multiple definitions of HE. After providing a brief overview of the history of engineers’ involvement in humanitarian projects, as well as the status of HE in US education, I will discuss what considerations are important in HE. The rest of the literature review will focus on better understanding what counts as participation in HE projects. I focus especially on participation because it has been deemed to be essential for the success of HE projects, but potentially also a form of tyranny when misused or imposed. Participation is also one of the a priori dimensions that I used to classify the methods. The third chapter presents both the methodological framework for my dissertation and the specific research methods I used. Specifically, my research approach was divided in two sequential but integrated phases. In the first phase, I performed a Qualitative Systematized Review of literature to identify methods which I then classified using a process of taxonomy development. For the second phase, I interviewed humanitarian engineering practitioners and analyzed interview transcripts using thematic analysis. Throughout the chapter, I discuss how I ensured that my research could be considered trustworthy. The appendixes contain supporting material for the methods chapter. Appendix A contains search strings used for the Qualitative Systematized Review described in section 3.3. Appendix B contains a list of all the methods that I collected from the literature review. Appendix C presents a participation framework that I created

based on the literature reviewed in section 2.6., and that I initially intended to use for classifying the methods, but then did not use it. Chapters four to seven present the findings from the two research phases. Chapter 4, titled “Principles, Methods, and Competencies,” reports the results of analyzing 48 papers that I collected through the Qualitative Systematized Review. Chapter 5 presents the use-inspired framework that classify methods along two dimensions: levels of community participation and purpose of the methods. Chapter 6 reports comments and observations from the practitioners I interviewed. Finally, chapter 7 reports emergent themes from the analysis of practitioner interviews that elucidate the real nature of HE practice and position building trust as a key factor for successful projects. Chapter 8 is the last discussion chapter. In this chapter, I first discuss how the findings reported in chapter 4 to 7 answer the research questions and how they relate and add to the broader literature on HE practice. Second, I discuss some broader themes that were not directly related to the research questions, but that emerged especially from chapter 4 and 7. While discussing findings, I also present some recommendations. Finally, I conclude by discussing a dissemination plan, ideas for translating my findings into teaching practice, and areas for future research.

CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Overview In this chapter, I review relevant literature related to HE to underscore the need for and the importance of answering my research questions. In the first section (2.2), I discuss multiple definitions of HE. Then, in section 2.3, I provide a brief overview of the history of engineers’ involvement in humanitarian projects. In section 2.4, I describe the status of HE in today’s US education. In section 2.5, I discuss what considerations are important in HE. In section 2.6, I will focus on understanding what participation is, including the link between degrees of participation and PFSMs. Finally, in section 2.7, I conclude by discussing the challenges of participation and the importance of choosing the appropriate PFSMs based on many factors, including the socio-cultural context of an HE project.

2.2 What is Humanitarian Engineering? HE has often been conceived as engineering with the goal of meeting humanitarian goals. Engineering has been often defined as “the application of mathematics and science in service to humanity and as a bridge that connects the sciences to the humanities” (Grasso, Callahan, & Doucett, 2004, p. 413), and the goal of humanitarianism is to promote present and future wellbeing for the direct benefit of underserved populations (Mitcham

and Munoz, 2009). Given those definitions, HE can be defined variously as: “the application of engineering skills specifically for meeting the basic needs of all people, while at the same time promoting human (societal and cultural) development” (VanderSteen, J., 2008, p. 8). “the artful drawing on science to direct the resources of nature with active compassion to meet the basic needs of all – especially the powerless, poor, or otherwise marginalized” (Mitcham and Munoz, 2010, p. 27).

However, others have moved away from the classical engineering definition and recognized the important role of design and research by putting them at the core of the HE definition:

“Humanitarian engineering is design under constraints to directly improve the wellbeing of underserved populations” (Schneider, Leydens, and Lucena, 2008, p.312) “‘Research and design under constraints to directly improve the wellbeing of marginalized communities” (The Pennsylvania State University, 2011).

The idea of designing under constrains is well aligned with many general definitions of engineering. For instance, in the National Academy of Engineering’s Engineer of 2020, the following definition is proposed for engineering:

“engineering is about design under constraint. The engineer designs devices, components, subsystems, and systems and, to create a successful design, in the sense that it leads directly or indirectly to an improvement in our quality of life, must work within the constraints provided by technical,

economic, business, political, social, and ethical issues” (National Academy of Engineering, 2004, p. 7).

EWB-Spain recognizes humanitarian technology (and technology in general) “to be linked to the cultural, social, economic, political, and environmental context in which it is developed” (Canavate & Casaus, 2010, p. 16), while EWB-France proposes the ‘citizen engineer’, who has to be “aware of and concerned with the ethical implications of engineering practice” (Paye, 2010, p.25). Thus, HE is a very complex interdisciplinary field, which combines knowledge and methods of a variety of disciplines, including engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and design.

2.3 Brief History of Engineers’ Involvement in Humanitarianism The historical review that follows does not aspire to be a thorough account of engineers’ involvement in humanitarian projects. Rather, the purpose of this section is to provide some historical context to my study. The historical review is based on Lucena and Schneider’s (2008) work. While in the first two paragraphs, I summarized what said by Lucena and Schneider (2008), in the last two paragraphs, I expanded Lucena and Schneider’s (2008) history with new sources that were published after their work. In addition to Lucena and Schneider’s (2008), more systematic and thorough historical reviews can be found in Jesiek and Beddoes (2010), Lucena, Schneider, and Leydens (2010), Mitcham and Munoz (2010), Wisnioski (2012), and in Vandersteen’s (2008) doctoral dissertation. In section 2.3., I will provide an overview of today’s HE status in US engineering education.

The involvement of engineers in humanitarian work began after WWII and, until the end of the 1960s, it was driven by the US and USSR, with the goal of modernizing

the independent countries emerging in Asia and Africa. On one hand, the US was hoping that these new countries would become new allies in a ‘modern’ stage of consumer capitalism. On the other hand, the USSR was searching for allies to expand industrialized socialism. The two superpowers believed that their goals could be achieved with large- scale development projects. For instance, while the US engineers were highly involved in expanding the Green Revolution in South East Asia, the USSR lead the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Such mega development projects did not include any consideration for the context in which they were implemented and followed the political and economic colonializing agenda of the involved superpowers. However, in the midst of these projects, one group of engineers in USA was attempting to develop technologies that were sensitive of the local context. Those were the engineers of the Volunteers In Technical Assistant (VITA), who did not believe in delivering mega aid packages, but rather thought that “the key to technology transfer was in the diffusion of technical information to help villagers develop technical expertise” (p. 249). While few other examples of this kind existed, the thinking driving VITA engineers can be seen as an extraordinary exception until the 1970s.

In the USA, the 1970s were characterized by “the questioning of the military- industrial complex, the impact of industrial technologies on the environment, and the use of military technology in the Vietnam War” (p. 250) and the questioning of the benefits of technology in general. At the international level, the negative outcomes on the ecosystem and local economies of the Green Revolution and the failure of many large- scale projects brought to light the need to conceive technologies that were appropriate to the local context. The wave of new thinking that aligned with the work of VITA

engineers was driven by Shumacher’s influential book Small is Beautiful (1973). In this book, Shumacher introduces the concepts that influenced the Appropriate Technology approach, for which good technological solutions had to be cheap, low-tech, and mindful of societal and environmental impacts. However, the rise of neoliberal economics, the decline of the Cold War, and President Reagan’s elimination of appropriate technology programs, stopped the exemplary development efforts that characterized the ‘70s (Lucena and Schneider, 2008). Because of these events, the 1980s are today known as the lost decade of development.

After the 1980s hiatus, the 1990s were characterized by a new enthusiasm toward development. On one hand, the international development field saw the rise of new thinking, on the other, more Engineers Without Borders (EWB) organizations were being established. International development workers moved beyond the concept of appropriateness to include community participation, empowerment, and social and environmental sustainability. The goal was not only to understand the context, but to “enable local people to share, enhance, and analyze their knowledge of life conditions, to plan and to act” (Chambers, 1994, p. 1437). The use of Participatory Action Researches methods, such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) (Chambers, 1994), included a commitment to reject a deficit-model of communities, and to see communities as partners rather than receivers and consumers of aid. Consequently, development workers began to adopt a framework that considered communities as being rich of human, natural, financial, and social assets that allowed them to “assemble their strengths into new combinations, new structures of opportunity, new sources of income and control, and new possibilities for production” (Kretzmann and McKnight, 1993, p. 6., as quoted by Mathie and

Cunnings, 2003, p.476). As a result, it became clear that sustainable development could not be achieved without community empowerment, which in turns requires communities’ full participation, leveraging communities’ existing assets, and recognizing that communities have the rights to “participate, decide, and even reject a SD [Sustainable Development] project or intervention” (Lucena, 2013, p. 810).

While international development workers were making the above conclusions, non-profit organizations such as EWBs were being established with the aim of providing technological assistance to disadvantaged communities around the world. The first EWB was born in France from the work at the prestigious ‘Ecole Nationale Des Ponts and Chaussées;’ inspired by the already well-known Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctor Without Borders); the organization was established in 1992 under the name Ingenieurs Sans Frontieres (Paye, 2010). Spanish students who studied in France through the Erasmus Programme got involved in EWB-France projects (Canavate and Casasus, 2010). When they returned to Spain, they created and founded Ingenieria Sin Fronteras (EWB- Spain) in 1992-1994, modeled after EWB-France (Canavate and Casasus, 2010). During the same time, Ingenieurs Zonder Grenzen was established on the Flemmish side of Belgium, while Ingénieurs Assistance Internationale- Ingenieurs Sans Frontieres was started on 1997 on the French side of Belgium (Meganck, 2010). Then, it was the turn of Canada in 2000 (Lucena and Schneider, 2008) and USA in 2001 (Amadei, Sandekian, and Thomas, 2009). In 2003, EWB-International was created as a network that connects 41 national member organizations (Lucena and Schneider, 2008) and many others have been established since. However, in contrast with the international development context, engineers appear to be still in the early phases of ‘appropriateness’ that characterized the

1970s, although some discussion about sustainability and community participation have gained attention (Schneider et al, 2009).

2.4 Humanitarian Engineering in US Engineering Education In the USA, in addition to the rapid growth of EWB chapters (see Amedei, Sandekian, and Thomas, 2009 for specific figures), engineering colleges have been institutionalizing HE, service-learning, and similar programs and courses in their curriculum. HE and others especially gained momentum after ABET EC 2000 because they allow institutions to meet requirements such as the ability to “design a system to meet desired needs… to function in multidisciplinary teams… to understand professional and ethical responsibility… [and] to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global context” (ABET, 2004, as quoted by Schneider et al., 2009, p. 44). Scholars have, in fact, shown that, in addition to meeting ABET criteria, HE courses and programs offer the opportunity for students to learn many valuable skills, attitudes, and forms of knowledge (Huff, Zoltowski, Oakes, 2016; Litchfield & Javernick-Will, 2014; Maloney, Dent, & Karp, 2013; Pierrakos et al., 2013). In the pages that follow, I list some HE and similar courses or programs in the USA. The faculties, students, and administrators of these programs are the direct audience of this dissertation. The following list of programs and organizations is a combination of lists reported by a variety of sources (e.g., Amedei et al., 2009; Mitcham and Munoz, 2010; Parkinson, 2007):  Technology Assist by Students (TABS), a student led organization founded in 2000 at

Stanford University.

 Engineering World Health (EWH), student founded in 2001 at University of Memphis under the guidance of professors Bob Malkin and Mohammad Kiani and currently based at Duke University, with the goal to “inspire, educate, and empower the biomedical engineering community to improve health care delivery in the developing world.” (Engineering World Health, 2004)

 Engineers for a Sustainable World (EWB) is an organization that is “comprised of students, university faculty, and professionals who are dedicated to building a more sustainable world for current and future generations.” (Engineers for a Sustainable World, 2014)

 Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE) is a student-run organization established in 2004 at Dartmouth University with the goal as part of EWB. Their mission is to “encourage development, improve health and reduce environmental impact through sustainable, affordable, socially-conscious solutions for communities in need” (DHE, 2012).

 Village Empowerment Program at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell that began in 1997 thanks the request of students to do international service work and has the goal of developing “systems that in general meet the health care, education, communication, energy, water, food production, and housing needs of villages in a sustainable way” (Duffy, 2008, p. 2). Out of this program, UMass-Lowell also created the Service-Learning Integrated throughout the College of Engineering (SLICE) that has the goal to “to integrate service-learning into a broad array of courses so that students will be exposed to service-learning in at least one course

every semester in the core curriculum in every program in the entire college of engineering” (UMass-Lowell, 2014).

 The Engineering in Technical and Humanitarian Opportunities of Service (ETHOS) at University of Dayton that was created in 2001 by a collaboration between students at University of Dayton and the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon. This program “is rooted in the belief that engineers are more capable to serve our world when they experience opportunities that increase their understanding of technology's global linkage with values, culture, society, politics and economics” (ETHOS, 2014).

 Engineering Project in Community Service (EPICS) created in 1995 at Purdue University in which “teams of undergraduates are designing, building, and deploying real systems to solve engineering-based problems for local community service and education organizations.” (EPICS, 2014).

 The Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities (MCEDC) stared in 2003 at the University of Colorado-Boulder has the goal to “Creating a world where all people can enjoy a safe, secure, healthy, productive, and sustainable life for all peoples should be a priority for the engineering profession” (Mortenson Center, 2014)

 Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) since 2006 at Pennsylvania State University that aims at developing solutions “with the four hallmarks of sustainability – technologically appropriate, environmentally benign, socially acceptable and economically sustainable” (The Pennsylvania State University, 2011).

 Colorado School of Mines was the first Humanitarian Engineering program in the USA to offer a minor in HE, initiated in 2003, with the goal to “teach students how engineering can contribute to co-creating just and sustainable solutions for communities” (Colorado School of Mines, 2014).

 The Global Perspectives Program (GPP) at Worchester Polytechnic Institute offers students the opportunity to “collaborate with faculty advisors and sponsor organizations to identify and solve pressing problems impacting communities around the world” (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2014).

 California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo started a program called SUSTAIN SLO that is described as “a community of faculty, students, and organizations in San Luis Obispo County who are involved in a research project to explore alternative ways of learning” to be professional engineers (California Polytechnic State University, 2012).

 The Humanitarian Engineering Center at Ohio State University offers a minor in HE for undergraduates and other opportunities for graduate students as well (Bixler et al, 2014).

 Oregon State University offer a minor in HE for undergraduates and a Peace Corps Master for civil, mechanical, biological and ecological, water resources, and environmental engineering graduates (Oregon State University, 2016).

 Michigan Tech’s Peace Corps Master’s International and Engineering http://www.mtu.edu/d80/programs/peace-corps-masters-intl/

 Univ. of South Florida’s Peace Corps Master’s International, degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. http://www.usf.edu/world/centers/peace-corps.aspx

All the aforementioned programs have the commonality to teach students an array of knowledge, skills, and attitudes by partnering them with disadvantaged communities locally and/or internationally and with the second goal to help communities improving their quality of life. Riley (2007) finds the double goal of students’ education and community development very problematic and argues that these programs tend to foster a neocolonialist mindset where only students really benefit. Likewise, Eprechet (2004) fears that “work-study programs contribute to the very kinds of underdevelopment and colonial-style North-South relations that they are intended to critically address” (Eprechet, 2004, as cited by Vandersteen, 2009). While I understand Riley’s and Eprechet’s concerns with this kind of programs, rather than antagonize the faculties, students, and administrator of HE and similar programs, I hope this dissertation can support them to continuing to do some good in the world in ways that do not replicate colonialism.

2.5 Important Considerations in HE Gathering information plays a crucial role in design (Crismond and Adams, 2012) because it can help better frame a problem and formulate proper solutions. One of the key aspects that distinguishes an expert designer from a beginner is that experts build knowledge through thorough research and use both “domain-specific knowledge and situation-relevant strategies to design effectively” (Crismond and Adams, 2012, p. 752). A series of studies done by Bursic and Atman (1997), Atman et al. (1999), and Atman et al. (2007) found that, when given the same task, more experienced designers tend to spend more time gathering information than less experienced designers. As HE is a design process, it is clear that effective humanitarian engineers as well must spend considerable time collecting information, so that they can “adequately define the problem,

generate appropriate alternative solutions, and analyze, evaluate, and select the best solution” (Bursic and Atman, 1997, p. 60).

However, what kind of information do engineers and humanitarian engineers tend to gather to formulate proper solutions? Trying to answer a similar question, Leydens and Lucena (2009a) found that faculties in HE programs and courses tend to value engineering science more than design and do not usually recognize the central role that “health, community development, language, cultural, social, and political” considerations (p. 159) play in HE. The phenomenon of dismissing social and contextual considerations in favor of a narrow focus on technical factors is a very common trend in engineering. When Pawley (2009) asked engineering faculties to define engineering, she found three “universalized narratives”, including the belief that engineering is “applied science and math”. This is what Oldenziel (2000) calls the “cultural authority of math and science” (p. 20, as cited by Hess and Strobel, p, 57). In addition to science and math, engineers recognize the need to gather “specific and quantifiable requirements such as cost, weight, technical specs, desirable functions, and timeline” (Lucena et al., 2010, p. 124). Yet, while such considerations are important for the functionality of a device or a system, humanitarian engineers must also understand that “information such as cost, weight, technical specs, desirable functions, and timeline acquires meaning only when the context of the person(s) making the requirements (their history, political agendas, desires, forms of knowledge, etc.) is fully understood” (Lucena et al. 2010, p. 125). In a previous publication, colleagues and I developed a framework grounded both in the literature and empirical data to classify considerations related to solve a HE challenge (Mazzurco, Huff, and Jesiek, 2014). The framework classifies the

considerations in four categories—technical, constraints to technical, stakeholders, and contextual—based on the focus of the consideration. A common trend that we saw in the data of our study, but that we did not published explicitly, was a great emphasis of considerations focused on stakeholders’ involvement. This is not surprising, as many scholars have argued that stakeholders’ participation is a key, if not the most important factor, in solving HE challenges (Lucena et al., 2010; Munoz and Mitcham, 2010). However, the HE literature lacks of a proper framework to describe the different degrees of community participation and to classify problem framing and problem solving methods (PFSMs) based on community participation. Filling this gap is indeed the goal of this dissertation.

In the following sections of this chapter, I will review literature on participation from other disciplines and suggest possible dimensions of the ‘participation’ construct. In the methods chapter (Ch. 3), I will explain how I will develop a system to classify PFSMs used in HE projects based on community participation, and other categories.

2.6 Participation Frameworks One of the key aspects, if not the most important, for the success of any HE project is communities’ participation. Mitcham and Munoz (2010) stress that to be sustainable, projects must be owned by the local people and that ownership can be achieved only through their participation. Humanitarian engineers should be able to “listen to the demands of citizens and other stakeholders, and let them have a say in the development of new technologies and infrastructures” (Schneider et al. 2008, p. 310). Moreover, the ways engineers see communities influences how they relate to the communities and the sustainability of the projects. For instance, Lucena (2013a) argues that engineers should

move from seeing community as clients, to see communities as citizens, that is, to recognize “not only the diversity and complexities of users but also their rights […] to participate, decide, and even reject a SD project or intervention” (p. 810). Participation and engineers-community relationships are the backbone of HE and similar projects. To illustrate the importance of community participation, it is worth to look into a failure case-study. On his first EWB assignment in Kenya, Mattias was working on energy efficient stoves that would reduce firewood consumption by about 50%. He had found out about solar cookers and thought that this solution would be even better because it would completely eliminate firewood consumption. However, one day while he was camping, the locals physically threatened him for cooking outside. Consequently, he realized that open-air cooking is not culturally appropriate in many rural Kenyan communities. Mattias’s was able to stop pursuing his solar cooking idea after suddenly realizing that it was not an acceptable technology for rural Kenyans (Goldmann, 2015). In this case, Mattias was luckier others because his early encounters with the locals led him to conclude that his idea was doomed to fail. Yet, this case-study is very illustrative of the key role that community participation play in HE projects.

However, participation is a complex concept. A very important aspect of conceptualizing participation in a project is to understand who gets to make decisions at each stage of a design process (Baillie, 2006; Mitcham and Munoz, 2010). Yet, participation is not only about distribution of decision-making power. It is also about how information flows between communities and engineers, what weight is given to such information by decision-makers, and what roles each counterpart plays. Furthermore, participation is not static during the design process and the degrees to which communities

participate can vary largely depending on the design stage and the goal of the project itself. Finally, depending on the design stage and the degree of community involvement, different methods could be used. To better understand the details of the aforementioned dimensions of participation, I compared and contrasted the participation frameworks proposed by multiple researchers Arnstein (1969), Biggs (1989), Chambers (2005), Cohen and Uphoff (1980), Davidson (1998), Druin (2002), Hage et al (2010), Hart (1992), Hussain (2010), Knaji and Greenwood (2001), Lilja and Ashbly (1999), Pretty (1995), VeneKlasen and Miller (2001), and White (1996). To these sources I also added Lucena (2013a) and Zoltowski et al. (2012), whose work, despite not offering a ‘participation ladder,’ inform some aspects of the definition of participation. In the following paragraphs, I describe the variation of each dimension of participation.

2.6.1 Who Makes Decisions? All the participation frameworks that I reviewed divide decision-makers in two groups. For instance, Arnstein (1969) and Davidson (1998) consider the relationship between power holders and citizens. Similarly, Biggs (1989), Chambers (2005), Knaji and Greenwood (2001), Lilja and Ashbly (1999), Pretty (1995) consider the relationship between some outsider entity (e.g., scientists, researchers, agencies) and the local population (often represented as rural farmers). All the authors consider three scenarios, two in which one of the counterparts has complete decision-making control and the other in which decision-making control is shared among the counterparts. However, Davidson (1998) notes also that even in the case of shared decision-making, there will be conditions is which one of the counterparts will have a little more power than the other.

Similarly, Zoltowski et al. (2012) show how an empathic relationship between stakeholders and designers allows stakeholders to influence decisions, even if stakeholders do not have any formal power.

2.6.2 How Does Information Flow? The only framework that clearly articulates how information flows is the one proposed by Hage et al. (2010). In their framework, they represent the direction of information flow with arrows that connect planners to stakeholders and vice versa. Other authors (e.g., Arnstein, 1969; Davidson, 1998) talk about information flow indirectly and some considerations can be inferred from the way they describe the relationship between the two counterparts. In general, at the bottom of any participation ladder, there is no information flowing, or information about decisions is given to the people who are affected by the decisions only after decisions are made. In some steps on top of the ladder, decision-makers begin to gather information from their counterparts in order to make better decisions. At the next stage, there is a two-way flow of information, in which the counterparts contribute equally to the decision-making. Finally, on the highest rungs of the participation ladders, farmers, or locals take charge of decision making processes and control how the information flows.

2.6.3 How Much Weight Does Information Have on Decisions? Even when information flows, there is variation in the way that information from communities and other stakeholders is used. For instance, Davidson (1998) distinguished between ‘limited consultation’ and ‘genuine consultation’ based on how information is used. In the former, decision-makers may or may not use the information, but, in the latter, they base decisions on this. Davison’s (1998) ‘genuine consultation’ is similar to a

form of empathic decision-making (Zoltowski et al., 2012) in which designers create deep and solid bonds with their stakeholders to ensure that decisions made are the best for their stakeholders. This kind of relationship may involve perspective-taking by part of the decision-makers.

2.6.4 What Roles Does Each Counterpart Play in Decision-Making? Depending on the dimensions described so far, people will play different roles in the decision-making process. Inspired by the work of Mathie and Cunningham (2008), Lucena (2013a) describes four different ways in which humanitarian engineers could relate to the communities they are serving:

 Communities-as-clients: “implies a relationship of expert to non-expert where client brings a problem (and constraints such as budget, timeline, size etc.) to the table while the engineer holds the expert knowledge to propose solutions to the problem” (p. 798).

 Communities-as-stakeholders: engineers “recognize the diversity of perspectives and interests among those with a stake on a technical solution” (p. 801).

 Community-as-users: engineers “acknowledge, understand, and incorporate a diversity of identities in original designs and acknowledge their agency in transforming original technologies, and their intended use, into something else” (p. 805).

 Communities-as-citizens: “recognizes not only the diversity and complexities of users but also their rights […] to participate, decide, and even reject a SD [sustainable development] project or intervention” (p. 810).

Chambers (2005) instead uses the following metaphors to describe the roles of outsiders and local people: dictator vs. slave, manipulator vs. puppet, researcher/planner vs. informant, employer vs. worker, rational economizer vs. collaborator, co-equal partners, facilitator/catalyst vs. analyst/actor/agent, supporter vs. owner. Zoltowski et al. (2012) distinguish user-centered design thinking from human-centered/empathic design thinking based on the way designers see stakeholders. In the former, stakeholders are seen as data points; in the latter, stakeholders are seen as valuable human beings with perspectives that can shape the design framing and solution.

2.6.5 How Does Participation Change During the Design Project? One limitation of the ladder rungs of the participation frameworks described so far is that they see participation fixed throughout a given project and do not distinguish participation based on community participation in each design stage. In contrast, Hart (1990) based his ladder of participation by considering who initiates and who carries on the project. On the top of the ladder he positions projects initiated by children and in which children share decisions with adults. A few rungs below, he positions projects that were instead initiated by adults. Similarly, Druin (2002) classified participation based on when children are involved in the design process. At the lowest degree of participation, children are considered testers who “test prototypes of technology that have not been released to the world by researchers or industry professionals” (Druin, 2002, p. 3). At the opposite end of her framework, children take the role of design partners, who are considered to be equal stakeholders in the design of new technologies throughout the entire experience” (p. 3). Building upon Hart’s (1990) and Druin’s (2002) framework and

her experience developing technology with marginalized children, Hussain (2010) developed a participation ladder for designing with marginalized children.

Although the ladders suggested by Hart (1990), Druin (2002), and Hussain (2010) capture how participation might change within a project, their ladders are fixed and cannot be applied if different dynamics occur. Cohen and Uphoff (1980), instead of using a ladder, argue that participation should be evaluated case-by-case depending on how people are involved when a project is initialized, during its implementation, and its evaluation. Kanji and Greenwood (2001) integrated Cohen and Uphoff’s (1980) ideas by scoring each project phase using their own participation ladder (figure 2.1). While use Kanji and Greenwood (2001) consider stages specific to a research project, humanitarian engineers should develop a participation scoring system to evaluate communities’ participation in each of the typical design stages:

 Project Impetus: decision-makers decide what the objective of the project is and whom to partner with.

 Problem framing: decision-makers “seek initially to understand the challenge as best they can, but then delay making design decisions in order to explore and comprehend the design challenge more fully” (Crismond and Adams, 2012, p. 747).

 Ideation & prototyping: decision-makers brainstorm about and construct possible solutions to the problem identified at earlier stage.

 Implementation: decision-makers implement the solution and test its effectiveness.

 Monitoring and maintenance: decision-makers set up a method that ensure that the project can be sustained once the outsiders left.

The design process is of course non-linear and very recursive, but, generally, these are all the phases that a designer would go through.

2.6.6 What Methods Could Be Used to Involve Communities?

Depending on who gets to decide, the direction that information flows, and the design phase, different methods to gather, deliver, or share information, frame a problem, or develop a solution may be used. When decision-makers want to inform their counterparts about what decisions were made, they could use public notices, press releases, discussions papers, exhibitions (Davidson, 1998) and/or presentations (Hage et al., 2010). When they want to gather information that they may or may not use, they could utilize

Figure 2.1. Example of Evaluation of Participation in a Project. Adapted from Kanji and Greenwood (2001, p. 54).

surveys, feedback channels, one-on-one interviews, and/or public meetings (Davidson, 1998; Hage et al, 2010). When instead they want to genuinely consult their counterparts, they may use workshops, bilateral sessions (Hage et al., 2010), focus groups, users or stakeholder panels (Davison, 1998), and empathize with them by interacting in informal setting and social situations (Zoltowski et al., 2012). To involve communities as much as possible in the problem-framing phase of a project, Humanitarian Engineers could use participatory methods, such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) (Chambers, 2005). Sharing prototyping is often a technique used during the solution development phase by human-centered designers (Zoltowski et al., 2012). Other strategies, that were not included in the reviewed participation frameworks but that could be use to involve communities in framing and solving humanitarian challenges, are collected in the following resources:

 The Human-Centered Design methods available in IDEO toolkit (IDEO, 2014).  The Photovoice method that has been widely used in nursing to better understand

health care needs of underprivileged people and used for advocacy purposes (Wang & Burris, 1997).

 The methods to assess the assets of a community reviewed by Kramer, Seedat, Lazarus, and Suffla (2012).

 The field guide for environmental engineers working in developing countries developed by Mihelcic, Fry, Myre, Philips, and Barkdoll (2009).

 The guide for participatory technology development created by Veldhuizen, Waters-Bayer and de Zeeuw (1997).

 Baillie’s (2010) book that describes processes for assessing needs and feasibility of transferring a technology into a disadvantaged community.

 The tools in Leydens and Lucena’s (2014) engineering for social justice model. However, a classification of these methods based on the degrees to which a community participates has never been proposed.

2.7 Challenges to choose the appropriate degree of participation Choosing the proper participation rung in one project is a very difficult task and depends on many factors. For instance, Hussain, Sanders, and Streinert (2012) observe that different sociocultural conditions might require different participatory approaches:

“In South Africa there is a strong tradition for community participation and collective decision making in communities, thus, it was fairly easy for researchers to gather participants from different levels of the community and together form a common vision for the project. In India, on the other hand, a bottom-up approach did not work […] due to the hierarchical structure of the country with strong government involvement in community issues, a tradition that can be traced back to British colonial rule.” (p. 93).

Similar to the challenge encountered in India, in a project to build prosthetic legs for children in Cambodia, Hussain (2010) encountered many barriers to children’s participation:

1. They visited children’s homes and showed interest in their lives before users trusted them and accepted to participate.

2. When they wanted to invite users to a workshop, they had to respect the local hierarchical order by getting support from the older and most respected prosthetists.

3. Because children are an important part of a family income, they had to make sure to have the shortest workshops possible with children, so that they would not loose valuable working hours.

4. They were not able to involve children in the prototyping process because parents would loose valuable working hours to ensure participation.

5. When they wanted to walk with a child to school to understand better their daily life, one mother stopped them because she was afraid of the high risk of child abuse that characterized that specific region.

Hussain (2010) was able to choose the proper participatory approach at each design stage. However, this is not always the case.

When participatory methods are not used properly, they can be a new form of tyranny (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Lucena (2013a) explains that “participatory facilitators often override existing legitimate decision-making processes” (p. 809), “participatory methods […] might lead to participatory decisions that reinforce the interests of the already powerful” (p. 809), and that a blind acceptance of participatory methods could exclude others that might be more appropriate. The consequences of this misuse of participatory methods can be very harmful. As Chambers (2006) puts it:

“citizen control can mean manipulation, collective action can mean compliance; and empowerment can mean license to gender discrimination

and petty tyranny. Participation can concentrate power and benefits in the hands of men and of local elites” (p. 105,107).

Similarly, Ika (2012) warns us about the chance of failure that occurs when outsiders use standardized approaches no matter the context of development aid interventions.

To avoid such negative outcomes, scholars have suggested many different ideas. Chamber (2006) suggests that ladders of participation, such those that I just reviewed, should be accompanied by a ladder of equity that can answer the questions “who benefits and who pays?” and “who stands to gain or lose?” (Mitcham and Munoz, 2010). Instead, Lucena, who defended the communities-as-citizens concept (see Lucena, 2013a), admits that even human-centered design methods (that see communities as stakeholders or users) might be better off than others might if engineers are collaborating with the right NGOs (Lucena and Dean, 2014). Additionally, Ika (2012) reminds us that “project management approaches should be tailored to […] context in general, the type of project, the political situation, actors in presence, and the type of design, supervision, and implementation approach” (p. 36). Finally, any social justice process should always be “democratic and participatory, inclusive and affirming of human agency and human capacities for working collaboratively to create change” (Adams et al., 2007, p. 3). “The goal of social justice is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs” (Adams et al., 2007, p. 1). The challenge is ensuring that one achieves not pseudo- participation but the kind of full and equal participation aspired to in this definition.

The above examples and considerations suggest that there are no right or wrong design methods in HE. Thus, designers should be able to “challenge, but not reject systematically, the governing mentalities that shape what is ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘true’”

(Nieusma, 2004, p.23) so that the appropriate methods could be used for the appropriate situation. Understanding what conditions are needed for each method to be successful is the second objective of this dissertation.

CHAPTER 3. METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research Objective and Questions As explained in the introduction (Chapter 1) and literature review (Chapter 2), the HE education literature still lacks a comprehensive repertoire of principles, methods, and mindsets that can be readily accessed by engineering students, advisers, and mentors to inform their HE projects. Thus, the long-term goal of my research related to HE is to create an online and highly interactive platform that HE practitioners and/or students could use to guide their projects. The platform would also allow users to add their narratives of lived experiences using specific techniques and/or adding new methods that are missing from the toolkit. These stories could be used as a) instructional resources that faculty could use to better prepare their students for HE projects, and b) research data to constantly advance the body of knowledge and know-how of HE. However, before being able to build the online platform much research needs to be done to 1) collect the content of the toolkit (e.g., methods, strategies, principles, or other factors), 2) create a proper classification of the collected methods, and 3) collect an initial set of lived experiences from practitioners. This dissertation aims at achieving these first three objectives.

It is also important to reiterate that any method, strategy, or principle in the platform or toolkit needs to be used not as “the one right way” or as cookbook instructions. Instead, it should used judiciously, flexibly, and adaptively in light of the unique sociotechnical circumstances and exigencies created by each HE project.

The research questions that will allow me to meet the aforementioned three objectives are:

1. What are the key characteristics of specific design methods that have been used/proposed in the HE and related literature?

3.2 Research Design Overview To address this dissertation’s research goals and answer the related RQs, I grounded my research in the Scholarship of Integration (SoI). Boyer (1990) explains that a SoI is “serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together and bring new insight to bear on original research” (Boyer, 1990, p. 19) and that is “interdisciplinary, interpretive, integrative” (Boyer, 1990, p. 21). Consequently, in my research I integrate knowledge and methods from various disciplines through qualitative interpretation. Additionally, SoI is use-inspired, that is, it moves “beyond syntheses towards the creation of use-inspired

frameworks” (Crismond & Adams, 2012, p. 742). Thus, given my use-inspired goal to create a toolkit that integrates knowledge and methods from multiple disciplines, SoI is the appropriate methodological foundation for this research study.

This study is comprised of two sequential but integrated phases. Each phase has its own data collection and data analysis approach, but both phases provide results that help answer both RQs and meet the objective of my dissertation. The goal of the first phase was to collect and classify methods that may facilitate community participation across the entire project cycle. I divided the first phase in two sequential sub-phases, i.e., Phase 1a and 1b. In phase 1a, I conducted a qualitative systematized review (QSR) that led me to collect 48 journal papers. The process of collecting and analyzing these papers is reported in section 3.3., while the results of analyzing and synthesizing the 48 journal papers is presented in chapter 4, titled “Principle, Methods, and Competencies to Facilitate Community Participation.” The 48 papers provided direct sources for the description of 64 methods that I then analyzed and classified during phase 1b. To classify these methods, I coupled the process of developing a taxonomy (Nickerson, Varshney, and Muntermann, 2013) with the coding strategies suggested by Saldaña (2010) and results display strategies suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994). The result of this first phase is a classification system organized along two main dimensions, i.e., levels of community participation and purpose of the methods. More details about the development of the classification system can be found in section 3.4, while the resulting classification system can be found in chapter 5. The development of the classification systems was the last step of the first phase.

In the second phase, I interviewed practitioners with experience in HE projects and asked them about their experience in the field, with a special focus on their strategies to facilitate community participation. I leveraged the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) (Flanagan, 1954) to elicit practitioners’ experiences, and Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze their experiences. More details about the research approach for this phase is described in section 3.5 and the results of this phase are reported in chapter 6, titled “Benefits and Challenges of Using Participatory Methods,” and in chapter 7, titled “Trust and Assets.”

In the pages that follow, I will first provide the details of the first phase, including overview of methods for data collection and data analysis (section 3.3 and 3.4). Then, I will describe the details of the second phase, including selection criteria and methods to recruit practitioners, interview approach, and analysis of interview transcripts (section 3.5). Table 3.1 reports all project activities and the resulting outcomes for each phase. Table 3.1 Project Activities and Outcomes Phas e

Data collection process

Obtained data

Data analysis process Outcome

1a Qualitative Systematic Review 48 journal articles

Qualitative content analysis Chapter 4

1b Snowballing 64 methods Qualitative content analysis & Taxonomy development process

Chapter 5

1c Semi-structured interviews 16 interview transcripts Thematic Analysis Chapter 6 & 7

3.3 Phase 1a: Qualitative Systematized Review Through my previous research and experience as adviser and instructor of global and HE projects, I became acquainted with many field-guides and manuals that provide useful information to ensure that students and professionals could appropriately involve community members in HE and similar projects. Examples of these field-guides and manuals are:

 The Human-Centered Design methods available in the IDEO toolkit (IDEO, 2014),

 The field guide for environmental engineers working in developing countries developed by Mihelcic et al. (2009), and

 Baillie’s (2010) book, which describes processes for assessing needs and feasibility of transferring a technology into a disadvantaged community.

However, I discovered these sources in a very unsystematic and almost serendipitous way. I had never actually followed a systematic process to identify a thorough list of field-guides, manuals, and scholarly publications that could inform HE practice, especially as related to best practices to involve community members. Thus, to collect data to answer my research questions, I undertook a qualitative systematized review (QSR) as the first step of my dissertation. A QSR is not the same as a traditional systematic literature review because it “attempts to include one or more elements of the systematic review process while stopping short of claiming that the resultant output is a systematic review” (Grant and Booth, 2009, p. 102). While I have included aspects of systematic literature reviews such as definition of clear inclusion criteria and adherence to the PRISMA selection process guidelines (Liberati et al., 2009), I violated some

aspects of systematic literature review (e.g., I was the only reviewer and I focused only on one database). Additionally, I am not claiming that my results are objective and generalizable (as it should be for systematic literature review); rather I argue that my results are transferable and trustworthy (as typical of qualitative studies). Yet, as explained in section 3.3.3, I took several measures to increase the reliability and trustworthiness of my process. In the following sub-sections (3.3.1 to 3.3.4), I will describe the details of the QSR process that I used to collect 48 journal publications and then to analyze them.

3.3.1 Selection Criteria My goal was to collect relatively recent journal publications that provide insights (principles, processes, methods, examples, and so on) on how to practice HE in a way that facilitates community participation. Specifically, before starting the search and selection process, I translated this goal into the following three inclusion criteria:

IC1. The papers need to focus on HE, broadly defined as design under-constrains to improve the well-being of underserved populations internationally. This criterion extends to papers that touch on topics similar to HE, e.g., appropriate technology, social justice, sustainable community development, or global service-learning in engineering, and participatory design in developing countries.

IC2. The papers need to focus on the social or procedural aspects of practicing HE. Examples of these are:

a. Frameworks, methodologies, processes, approaches, principles, or collection of those.

b. Methods, tools, techniques, dimensions, mindsets

c. Lessons learned d. Case studies focused on small-scale or community-based projects.

IC3. Published since 1992 because this is when the first Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter was established (Paye, 2010).

During the process of selecting the papers, I was also able to establish criteria for discarding papers. I recorded these reasons to further clarify the scope of my research. I called these reasons exclusion criteria (ECs): EC1. Papers in this category were in direct violation of the IC1, i.e, not focused on HE

or similar. Examples include papers focused on: a. Environmental science or sustainable development in terms of only

environmental sustainability. b. Management of forests or natural resources (e.g., water), without any

direct link to engineering or technology (typically policy related). c. Emergency relief: although the term humanitarian is often associated with

first response to natural catastrophes (e.g., 2010 earthquake in Haiti), my research does not include this specific topic, because engineering students do not (and likely should not) get involved with first response to humanitarian emergencies.

d. Healthcare: even if situated in developing countries, but does not include discussion of the social aspects and procedures of developing technologies related to healthcare (i.e., I did include papers that talked about healthcare technologies for underserved populations).

e. Food security: even if situated in developing countries, but does not include discussion of the social aspects and procedures of developing technologies related to food security.

f. Education initiatives in developing countries or educational initiatives not related to HE.

g. Development of technologies in non-developing countries. EC2. Papers that met EC1, but violated EC2 because they focused on the

technical/physical aspects of technology being developed for an underserved community, but did not talk about the social factors of the technology.

EC3. Papers that met EC1, but focused on large-scale projects. Example of these are papers focused on creation of businesses, industrialization of developing countries, and/or related to interventions of large international organizations (e.g., USAID, World Bank, and others).

EC4. Papers that met EC1, but primarily focused on students learning or on curriculum reform. This includes papers that discuss the impacts of HE classes on students’ learning or investigate characteristics of students enrolled in such classes. Additionally, I excluded papers that focused on how to integrate HE in the engineering curriculum. However, I did include papers focused on report of student-led HE projects and methods, principles, mindsets and others to teach to students (these papers in fact meet IC2).

EC5. Papers that focus on Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D), Geographic Information System (GIS), or web-based/“e- “ issues, even if they consider the social aspects and procedures.

EC6. Papers that were published in proceedings of conferences or were not peer- reviewed papers (e.g., editorials and so on).

The inclusion and exclusion criteria presented above are also the product of the reliability process described in subsection 3.3.3.

3.3.2 Search and Selection Process To identify the final collection of 48 papers, I followed four steps, adapted from the PRISMA selection process (Liberati et al., 2009): 1) database search, 2) title screening, 3) abstract screening, and 4) full text appraisal. I also searched for papers in two journals focused on HE programs (International Journal of Service Learning in Engineering and Journal of Humanitarian Engineering) that are not indexed in Compedex and Inspec. Below, I report details about each phase:

Database search: to identify papers I looked into the Compedex and Inspec databases using Engineering Village. I focused on these two databases because they are the most comprehensive for engineering-related fields. I used 47 search strings (reported in Appendix A), which yielded to an initial total of 1448 articles. In many cases, I had to use compound search strings to narrow the results to the space of interest. For instance, “community participation” would led to too many results, most of which were most likely not related to his specific study. Therefore, to narrow it down I used the compound search string “community participation” AND “engineering,” which led to 87 resulting journal papers. Search strings like “appropriate technology” AND design, “sustainable development” AND “developing world,” and “participatory” AND “developing countries,” led to the largest number of papers (216, 205, 158, respectively). Nine search strings led to no results (i.e., no papers were found), fifteen strings led to 10 or less

papers, twenty strings led to 11 to 100 papers, only one string led to 101-200 papers, and only two string led to more than 200 papers, the highest being 216.

Title and source screening: the goal of this step was to exclude duplicates and papers that were clearly violated the inclusion criteria. Thus, I screened titles of the 1448 papers to discard 1) duplicates (n = 314) and 2) papers that met the EC criteria based on titles (n = 934). At this point, I did not apply EC4 because I wanted to read the abstracts of those types of paper before actually discarding them, as they might have included information on HE practice in addition to students’ learning. Of the 934 discarded papers, 766 papers were discarded due to EC1, 35 due to EC2, 28 due to EC3, 46 due to EC5, and 55 due to EC6. Table 3.2 reports examples of titles of papers that were discarded because of EC1, EC2, EC3, and EC5. In screening the titles, if I was in doubt, I decided to keep the paper rather than discarding it. This choice was to avoid discarding potentially important papers that had vague and/or inaccurate titles. This process left me with 200 papers for the abstract screening step. To note is that these 200 papers that survived were the product of only 29 of the 47 search strings I used (that is, 18 search strings did not produced papers that survived the title and source screening, because produced duplicates or papers that did not meet some IC).

Table 3.2. Example of Titles of Papers that Were Discarded Example of titles discarded because EC1 (not focused on humanitarian engineering) “Sustainable urbanization in megacities role of nonmotorized transportation” “Model of Tsunami preparedness for Indonesian Tsunami prone areas communities” “Conflicts over water resource management in Brazil: A case study of inter-basin transfers” “Point of use water treatment with forward osmosis for emergency relief” “Participatory impact assessment of soil and water conservation scenarios in Oum Zessar watershed, Tunisia” “Implementing an inclusive curriculum for women in engineering education” “Ambient Assisted Living healthcare frameworks, platforms, standards, and quality attributes” Examples of title discarded because EC2 (focused on technology) “Small hydro power in India: Current status and future perspectives” “Transferring technology for surface-wave testing and seismic site-response analysis in Haiti” “Point-of-care nucleic acid testing for infectious diseases” “Keeping PV projects alive: Financial sustainability of PV implementation in Swaziland” Example of titles discarded because EC3 (large scale) “Sustainability of Large-Scale Algal Biofuel Production in India” “Energizing the world: Electric energy in emerging economies” “Ten years of World Bank action in transport: Evaluation” Example of titles discarded because of EC5 (Information and communication tech) “Women and ICT in Africa and the Middle East: Changing Selves, Changing Societies” “On the emancipatory role of rural information systems” “E- and efficiency, accountability and transparency”

Abstract screening. At this step, I reviewed the abstracts of the 200 papers to decide whether they met IC1 and IC2. This process led me to discard 145 papers. Of the discarded papers, 43 were discarded due to EC1, 23 due to EC2, 28 due to EC3, 33 due to EC4, 5 due to EC5, and 13 due to EC6. A total of 55 papers survived the abstract screening process. These 55 papers were the product of only 19 of the 47 search strings I used (that is 28 search strings did not produced papers that survived the abstract screening stage). To these 55 papers, I added 26 papers that I retrieved from the archives

of the International Journal of Service Learning in Engineering, which is not indexed in Compedex and Inspec. These 25 papers were selected by applying the same criteria used for the 55 papers that survived the abstract screening. Thus, at this stage, I was left with 80 papers for the next step.

Full-text appraisal. For this step, I read the 80 papers that survived the abstract screening step and I kept 48 papers. Of the 33 discarded papers, 5 were discarded due to EC1, 8 due to EC2, 11 due to EC3, 6 due to EC4, and 3 due to EC6. The next step was to analyze the papers and to look for strategies, techniques, and other factors that may facilitate community participation. Before describing the anlysis process (in section 3.3.4), I will report on my strategy to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of the selection process I described above.

3.3.3 Reliability of Selection Process The main limitation to the selection process described above is that I undertook the process alone, while best practices for systematic literature reviews suggest that two or more researchers should undertake the selection process. To mitigate this limitation, I asked two colleagues to apply my approach to a smaller set of papers and then I calculated inter-rater reliability and discussed disagreement with them. First, I verified my title screening process. I gave 50 titles to two raters for review. The raters reviewed the titles independently and then sent me their results. Then, I calculated Cohen’s and Fleiss’ kappa to assess Inter-Rater Reliability (IRR). Cohen’s k between rater 1 and myself was 0.65 (substantial agreement based on Landis and Koch (1977)), and 0.79 (substantial) between rater 2 and myself. After I evaluated IRR, I met with the two raters separately and discussed disagreement. Most of disagreement was due to a lack of clarity

of my inclusion and exclusion criteria that led to confusion. This allowed me to better rephrase and clarify my criteria. After these meetings, I repeated the title screening process again by myself. Second and lastly, I asked the two same raters to read 20 abstracts and to make a decision regarding their inclusion or exclusion. Again, they rated the abstracts independently and sent their results to me and then I calculated Cohen’s k. The results were Cohen’s k of 0.68 with rater 1, and 0.79 with rater 2 (substantial agreement for both). Again, I met with the two raters and discussed disagreement. Then, I repeated the abstract screening process. The process of calculating IRR and discussing disagreement allowed me to solidify and clarify my selection criteria and led me to include two more papers in my second pass (before IRR I had a final set of 46 papers, after IRR 48). The numbers reported in section 3.3.2 relate to post-IRR process.

3.3.4 Analysis and Synthesis of Selected Papers To analyze and synthesize the 48 papers, I followed a qualitative content analysis approach that Hsieh and Shannon (2005) define as “a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns” (p. 1278). However, before actually analyzing the papers, I divided the papers in two groups: group A included conceptual and theoretical papers (n = 27), while group B included cases studies or reports of projects (n = 21). I used the group A papers to develop my codebook and then I used the codebook to analyze the group B papers.

The first step of analyzing the group A papers was to create a first set of codes through an inductive coding process. This process led me to create 98 different codes. Then, I began grouping the codes into themes. In this process, I used sticky notes and white boards to arrange and re-arrange the 98 initial codes into themes. After a series of attempts and iterations, I produced 14 major themes. Finally, I grouped the 14 major themes in three overarching themes, named “principles,” “methods,” and “competencies.” During this process, I often consulted members of dissertation committee (especially my chair) to discuss these themes. The result of this process is presented in chapter 4.

3.4 Phase 1b: Classification of Methods Thanks to the qualitative systematized review and a further snowballing step (see section 3.4.1), I was able to retrieve a total of 64 methods, which I classified by leveraging a systematic process similar of that used to create taxonomies (Nickerson et al., 2013). This process is described in sections 3.4.2-4, while the resulting classification system is reported in chapter 5. Here, it is worth reiterating that the goal was not to collect all existing methods, but rather to collect a large enough sample that would allow me to create a use-inspired framework. Thus, the 64 methods retrieved are a good representation of existing methods, but they are surely not all the methods that have been used or proposed to be used to support community participation in HE.

3.4.1 Collecting the Final Set of Methods The systematic literature review process described in section 3.3 led me to retrieve 48 papers that described practices that facilitate community participation in HE projects. However, only 10 papers described methods in detail within the paper itself. Specifically, these 10 papers provided a total of 11 methods, as reported in table 3.3. In table 3.3, the

first column (QSR Source) reports the article I retrieved with the qualitative systematized review (QSR), the second column the name of the method mentioned in the QSR source, and the third column (type of method) reports to the grouping I presented in chapter 4.

Table 3.3. Sources Obtained Through the QSR Process QSR Source Name of method Type of method Avrai et al. (2012) Risk Management Framework

4.2.4 – Evaluation and Decision Making tools

Aslam et al. (2013) Photovoice 4.2.5 – Participatory methods Bowen and Acciaioli (2015) Arena model

4.2.4 – Stakeholder identification methods

Garfi & Ferrer-Mati (2011)

Multicriteria Analysis (MCA)

4.2.4 – Evaluation and Decision Making tools

Leydens and Lucena (2014)

The Privilege Walk and Privilege by Numbers 4.2.6 – Self-awareness tools Design Evaluation Matrix on Human Capabilities

4.2.4 – Evaluation and Decision Making tools

Magoon et al. (2010) Message board 4.2.7 - Miscellaneous McConville and Mihelcic (2007) Sustainability Matrix

4.2.4 – Evaluation and Decision Making tools

Okello et al. (2014) SWOT – AHP 4.2.4 – Evaluation and Decision Making tools Ones (2013) Theater 4.2.5 – Participatory methods Walton & DeRenzi (2009) Value-Sensitive Design 4.2.2 – Design tools

The other 37 papers, instead, referenced and/or simply mentioned methods that could be used to facilitate community participation. Thus, to collect further specific methods, I had to follow a snowball process starting from the 48 papers I had already acquired. Table 3.3 summarizes the process by showing how some of the collected papers led me to additional sources that I used to create the classification system reported in Chapter 5. Table 3.3 is organized in four columns. The first (QSR source) reports the source from the qualitative systematized review (QSR). The second column (Suggested

method) reports the name of the method(s) suggest by the QRS source. The third column (Retrieval approach) reports the way I retrieved the direct source of the methods, which is then reported in the fourth column (Direct source). For instance, Amadei et al. (2009) (the QSR source) present a model for sustainable HE projects and suggests that rapid rural appraisal methods (the suggest method) should be used, citing Beebe’s (2001) field guide to rapid rural assessment (the direct source). In this case, the retrieval approach was direct citation, but in other cases, where the direct citation was not available, I used Google search. This snowball process (whenever possible) led me to six main sources of methods, which contained a cumulative total of 90 methods. Many sources reported the same methods. For instance, Alemedom et al. (1997), Freundenberger (2008), and PeaceCorps (2005) all reported the participatory mapping method. Thus, after deleting duplicates, I obtained a final count of 64 methods, which I classified following the process reported in the next sub-sections (3.4.2-4). Appendix B reports a table that lists all the methods, along with their direct source(s).

Table 3.4. Sources of Methods Obtained by Snowballing From the QSR Sources QSR Source

Suggested method

Retrieval approach Direct source

Number of methods

Amadei et al. (2009)

Rapid Rural Appraisal Direct citation Beebe (2001) 10

Chisolm et al. (2014)

Hygiene Evaluation Procedures

Direct citation Almedom et al. (1997) 7 Hussain & Sanders (2012) and Hussain et al. (2010)

Generative Design Tools

They cite a conference paper (Sanders) that provides a classification of these tools, but I could not find a manual with the description of the actual tools.

Leydens and Lucena (2014)

Human Centered Design

Direct citation IDEO’s toolkit (2014) 37 Social Analysis Systems Direct citation

Chevalier and Buckles (2008) 18

White (1997)

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)

White (1997) cited very old work, so I preferred to look for more recent publications related to PRA

Freudenberger (2008) 10

Peace Corps (2005). 8

Issues Structuring Methods (ISM)

White (1997) lists a series of method under the umbrella of ISM, but does not cite a source. A google search did not lead to any recent publications of ISMs.

Total (before discarding duplicates) 90

3.4.2 Developing Classification System To classify the 64 methods that I retrieved, I followed a systematic process similar to those used to develop taxonomies, i.e., “systems for grouping objects of interest in a domain based on common characteristics” (Nickerson et al., 2013, p. 338), where, in my case, the “objects” are the 64 methods that I collected. I emphasize the word “similar” in the previous sentence, because while I am not developing a ‘true’ taxonomy, Nickerson et al.’s (2013) strategy allowed me to provide more structure to my process of developing the classification system for the methods. According to Nickerson et al. (2013), developing a taxonomy is an iterative and creative process which requires a mix of an empirical-to-conceptual (inductive) or a conceptual-to-empirical (deductive) analysis of the objects (i.e., the methods I collected) to develop the dimensions and the levels of each dimension (Nickerson et al., 2013). However, before analyzing the methods I set ending conditions (Nickerson et al., 2013), which provided an indicator to understand when the process of analyzing the methods and constructing the classification system was complete. At the end, once the ending conditions were met, I have also tested the reliability of the classification system by calculating IRR, and I modified the classification system as needed. In Figure 3.1, I represent this iterative process using a flowchart. In the following subsections, I report my ending conditions (3.4.2.1), the deductive-inductive process of analyzing the methods (3.4.2.2), and the IRR process and its consequences. The final classification system is a 3x3 matrix. The rows are organized around three major project phases, i.e., 1) problem framing and planning, 2) context-related information gathering, and 3) solution development. Within each phase, the methods are

grouped together based on their specific function. For example, within the problem framing and planning phase, there are four groups based on four distinct, but related functions: 1) to understanding a problem, 2) to formulate goals or objectives, 3) to rank goals or objectives, and 4) to plan a project. The columns are organized around three levels of community participation, i.e., passive, consultative, and co-constructive. The classification system is further described in chapter 5.

3.4.2.1 Ending Conditions Before beginning classifying PFSMs, Nickerson et al. (2013) explain that researchers need to choose ending conditions. There are two types of ending conditions: objective and subjective. Nickerson et al (2013) add that a researcher is free to select all or a sample of the ending conditions (both subjective and objective) as they see the need. In the example reported in their paper, they use only two objective conditions and all the subjective conditions to develop a taxonomy of mobile applications.

Figure 3.1. Flowchart of Process to Develop the Classification System

The objective ending conditions comprise: a) “all objects or a representative sample of objects have been examined”; b) “no object was merged with a similar object or split into multiple objects in the

last iteration”; c) “at least one object is classified under every characteristics of every dimension”; d) “no new dimensions or characteristics were added in the last iteration”; e) “no dimensions or characteristics were merged or split in the last iteration” ; f) “every dimension is unique and not repeated”; g) “every characteristic is unique within its dimension”; h) “each cell is unique and is not repeated” (p. 344)

In the case of this study, I decided that I would end the development process when I met the objective ending conditions a), b), d), e), f), g), and h). I decided to exclude the ending condition c) because for each “goal,” I could not find methods that spanned all the community participation levels.

The subjective ending conditions comprise: i. Conciseness: “a taxonomy should contain a limited number of dimensions and a

limited number of characteristics in each dimension, because an extensive classification scheme with many dimensions and many characteristics may exceed the cognitive load of the researcher and thus be difficult to comprehend and apply” (p. 341).

ii. Robustness: “a useful taxonomy should contain enough dimensions and characteristics to clearly differentiate the objects of interest” (p. 341). The

condition of robustness provides the lower bound for the number of dimensions and characteristics of a taxonomy, while the conciseness determines condition the upper number.

iii. Comprehensiveness: requires that the taxonomy has all the dimensions of the object of interest.

iv. Extendible-ness: “a useful taxonomy should allow for inclusion of additional dimensions and new characteristics within a dimension when new types of objects appear” (p. 341).

v. Explanatory-ness: “provide useful explanations of the nature of the objects under study or of future objects to help us understand the objects” (p. 342).

For developing the classification system, I decided to drop the conditions of comprehensiveness, because I am not interested in all of the possible dimensions of the methods, but rather I want to classify them based on their main dimensions, in my case, design phase (specific goal) and level of community participation. I decided to drop the condition of extendible-ness because I believe that evidence that such condition is met can only be collected through a long period of time that exceeds the timeframe of this dissertation. 3.4.2.2 Deductive-inductive analysis of the methods Once the ending conditions have been set, a researcher can proceed with the development of the classification system’s dimensions and related characteristics. The process of developing the taxonomy is iterative. At any iteration, empirical-to-conceptual (i.e., inductive) or conceptual-to-empirical (i.e., inductive) approaches to analyze the methods can be used. For instance, in Nickerson et al.’s (2013) example, they ran seven iterations

to create the taxonomy, of which four were empirical-to-conceptual (i.e., inductive) and the others conceptual-to-empirical (i.e., inductive).

In the case of this dissertation, I used an iterative mix of deductive and inductive approaches to create the classification system. I began with IDEO methods because it was the source that provided the largest number of methods. I started tracking information using color-coding for different aspects of the methods, e.g., participation, function, duration, difficulty, required supporting materials and other aspects (as shown in figure 3.2). These dimensions were particularly explicit in IDEO methods (figure 3.3), but were not reported explicitly in other methods. Because many methods did not include information related to the duration, difficulty, and required materials, I was able to classify the methods only along two main dimensions (i.e., project phase and community participation). While color-coding each method, I was also recording this information in an excel spreadsheet. Specifically for the participation dimension, I tried to classify the methods using participation dimensions reported in Appendix C (which were based on the literature review in section 2.6). However, I soon encountered methods that did not really fit that framework, so I began recording other information, which could have informed the participation level. For instance, I recorded who participated in the methods and what each participant did. Figure 3.3 reports one of the first methods for which I began recording this information. Similarly, I collected information regarding the function of the methods by simply recording what the description of the methods suggested about its specific goal.

Once I recorded information related from all the methods, I began creating themes

that led to groupings for the methods. This was a very iterative and creative process, during which I used sticky notes to move around methods to group them in different categories based on their function and the way community members participate. An example of these grouping process using sticky notes is reported in figure 3.3. During this process, I created different frameworks that I then discarded. For instance, I had first

Figure 3.2. Legend for Color-Coding Scheme

Figure 3.3. Example of Application of Color-Coding on an IDEO Method

organized the methods in four participation levels: passive, active, constructive, and co- constructive. While the passive category survived, the active became consultative and I merged the constructive with the co-constructive. Similarly, I went through a similar process to create the grouping based on the function of the method. To do so, I grouped methods together based on the similarity of their goals and created a first level of function-groups. Then, I grouped these function groups in larger project phases. In one of the first attempt I had six function groups, which then became four, and finally five. Every time, I would create new levels or grouping for each dimension (participation levels and function), I would apply this grouping to all methods. Many times, there were methods that did not fit the grouping so I had to create new groupings. Thus, the whole process was very iterative.

At end of this iterative process, I had created a framework that organized the methods in a 5x3 matrix. The row were organized based on five design phases: 1) problem identification, 2) gathering and framing information, 3) objective identification, 4) solution ideation and selection, and 5) solution development and implementation. The columns were organized along three participation levels: passive, consultative, co- constructive. As mentioned before, these two resulting dimensions were not the only important characteristics of the methods, but were the only aspects that clearly cut across all the methods. For instance, both IDEO and Almedom et al. (1997) provided information about required materials for using the methods, but other sources did not provide this information explicitly. If other sources had provided this information explicitly, then I could have created a third dimension related to amount of required

materials. The IRR calculation process, as described below, allowed me to revise the groupings and led me to the final framework that I described earlier in this section. 3.4.2.3 Inter-Rater Reliability of the classification system To evaluate the reliability of the classification system, I asked four research colleagues (an associate professor, and three engineering education PhD students) to evaluate 19 methods (it was supposed to be 20, but I inadvertently distributed 19 methods). Specifically, for each method, I asked them to select to which project phase and which participation level the method belonged. They were also given the opportunity to indicate that they were not sure, thus avoiding forcing them to choose a category when unsure. Two raters were randomly given 10 methods and the other raters were given 9 methods. Each method was rated by two raters as reported in Table 3.5. This division of assignments was done to reduce the burden on each rater, while at the same time ensure that the classification system was tested using about a third of all the methods.

Because of how I decided to distribute the methods among the four raters, I had to use Fleiss’ kappa rather than Cohen’s kappa to calculate inter-rater reliability. In fact, while Cohen’s kappa requires that the same two raters rate each item, Fleiss’s kappa requires only that the same number of raters rate each item (i.e., two raters for each method) (Fleiss, 1971). The resulting kappa values were .49 for project phase (moderate) and .73 for participation level (substantial). The result for the participation level was highly satisfactory also because there was no instance in which all the raters (myself and the other two raters that evaluate a method) completely disagreed. Consequently, I did not modify the participation levels.

The result for the project phase rating was instead unsatisfactory, because the kappa was quite low and there were five methods for which all raters disagreed. Unfortunately, a formal debriefing meeting with all raters was not possible because of the busy schedule of the raters and the fact that one rater had left Purdue. I was still able to consult informally and quickly with the raters, who shared their general opinions on the classification system. Based on this informal and quick feedback and an examination of the method that resulted in greater disagreement, I updated the classification system related to the project phase. The new and final dimension comprises three major phases: 1) problem framing and planning, 2) information gathering, and 3) solution development. Each phase was further divided in more specific categories based on the specific function of the method. The final classification system is reported in chapter 5.

Table 3.5. Assignment of Methods for Review Method ID Rater 1 Rater 2 Rater 3 Rater 4

1 × × 2 × × 3 × × 4 × × 5 × × 6 × × 7 × × 8 × × 9 × ×

10 × × 11 × × 12 × × 13 × × 14 × × 15 × × 16 × × 17 × × 18 × × 19 × ×

3.5 Phase 2: Interviews of Practitioners While the first phase of this dissertation aimed at collecting and classifying methods, the second phase focused on what actually happens in the field. Specifically, I am interested in understanding what conditions may facilitate community participation in HE and similar projects. To achieve this goal, I interviewed 17 practitioners that had experience in conducting HE projects.

In the next subsections, I first provide a profile of my study participant and explanation of how I selected the participants (3.5.1). Second, I will describe the interview procedures I used to elicit practitioners’ experiences and process followed to

transcribe and open-license the transcripts (3.5.2). Finally, I will explain the process I followed to analyze the transcript of the interview with my study participants (3.5.3).

3.5.1 Selection, Recruitment, and Profiles of Participants. I used three criteria to select participants for this study:

1. They must have participated to at least one HE project from beginning to finish, including travelling abroad. This requirement is to ensure that the participant had some substantial experience in the field.

2. The participants must have worked on a project within the last 5 years. This requirement ensured that they had fresh memories of their experiences.

3. The participants must have a technical background or must have worked very closely with technical professionals in HE or similar projects.

To select participants that met these three criteria, I used my personal network as well as a snowballing process in which participants introduced me to other potential participants. Through this process, I contacted 21 participants, interviewed 17, and kept 14 transcripts for the final analysis. Of the five participants I contacted but did not interview, two did not respond my invitation, one declined the invitation, and the last one accepted the invitation but then we were not able to talk because he was on sabbatical and we were unable to find a mutually convenient time.

I decided to discard three transcripts because of three different reasons. In the first case, although the participant was very knowledgeable on HE, he had not been involved in any project in the last five years, thus did not meet the second selection criterion. I realized he did not meet the criterion only during the interview, otherwise I would have not invited him to participate in the first place. In this case, I completed the interview, but

then I did not put resources and time into transcribe and analyze it. In the second case, the participant instead of answering my questions, he continued sending me his articles to read. Because of this, the interview did not last long and did not elicit any information that was not already in the papers he sent me (which I had already analyzed because of the QSR described in section 3.3). Given the lack of interesting material in the interview, I decided not to put efforts and resources in transcribing and analyzing it. In the third and last case, the participant insisted to have the interview in Italian rather than English, because she felt more comfortable talking in Italian. I accepted her request thinking that I would have had the time to translate the interview afterwards. However, I then realized I did not have the time and the resources to translate the interview and thus I decided to exclude this interview.

The selection process left me with 14 transcripts to analyze, which is well in the range of the number of interviews (10 to 15) I had proposed in my preliminary exam. Only four of the participants were women and the rest were men. Only one participant was Hispanic, while all the others were white-Caucasian. Four participants worked outside academia, while all the other were affiliated to a university and were all involved with student-led HE project in different roles. Of the 14 participants, 10 accepted to have their identity associated with this study, while the other four were left anonymous. Specifically, one participant asked to be left anonymous since the beginning. The other three instead accepted to have their name associated with the study at first, but then they did not have the time to review the transcript. Consequently, they decided to be included only if anonymized. Below, I report brief profiles of the 11 participants who agreed to release their identity to the public.

 Dr. David Munoz, PhD in mechanical engineering at Purdue, and has done extensive engineering work in Honduras and served as director of the Humanitarian Engineering minor at Colorado School of Mines.

 Emily Wigley, engineer at Knowles Electronics, EWB professional chapter member, who has been involved in many HE projects through EWB.

 Gary Burniske, Managing Director of Purdue University’s Center for Global Food Security, has 35 years of international experience in international land development work with a technical focus on sustainable agriculture. He is actively engaged in supporting I2D lab’s HE projects at Purdue.

 Dr. David Frossard, is an adjunct professor in the Humanitarian Engineering program, Colorado School of Mines. He served twice as a Peace Corps volunteer, in the Philippines (‘85-’87) and Zambia (‘03-’05). He is the former faculty advisor for the Mines student chapters of Engineers Without Borders, Bridges to Prosperity, Engineers for a Better World, and Amnesty International. He specializes in the anthropology – theory and practice – of sustainable community development.

 Dr. Anne Dare, Post Doc Research Associate at Purdue University, has engaged in a global service-learning project and her dissertation work was related to water and sanitation in the Middle East. She also has supervised the Global Design Teams program at Purdue.

 Dr. Marissa Jablonski is an Associate Researcher and Instructor in the Sustainable Peacebuilding Master’s Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

(UWM) and holds a PhD in civil/environmental engineering from UWM. She serves as mentor of UWM’s EWB student chapter.

 Dr. Kevin Passino, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of Humanitarian Engineering Center at The Ohio State University. He has many years of experience with student-led HE projects.

 Robin Semer, environmental engineer and project manager at Parsons. She volunteers for the Chicago Engineers without Borders chapter and has been project leader for one EWB project in Central America.

 Mark Henderson, Associate Dean of Barrett Honors College, professor in the Department of Engineering, and director of GlobalResolve at ASU. Through GlobalResolve, he has been involved in numerous HE projects.

 Ken Kastman, P.E., president at Earth-Whys, LLC, an earth-related consulting company; and Senior Consultant at AECOM. He is a member of the EWB Chicago professional chapter and has been involved with several HE projects through EWB.

The last four participants that were not listed above decided to be anonymous. I assigned them the pseudonyms of Robert, Michael, Andrew, and George. To maintain their anonymity, I provide only few details of their background to demonstrate that they met the selection criteria. Robert is a faculty in an engineering school of an R1 University, who has extensive experience doing HE projects in Africa with students. Michael has a leadership position in an international HE NGO based in a country outside the USA. Andrew is a professional bridge engineer, who has been volunteering for an international HE NGO. George is a faculty member in environmental sciences who has been doing

interdisciplinary HE projects with students the past 15 years. Table 3.6 provides a summary of the key demographics of the study participants, including title, affiliation, educational background, and other relevant experiences.

Table 3.6. Key Characteristics of Study Participants. Participant Title Affiliation Educational background Relevant experiences

Anne Dare Post Doc Research Associate

Innovation to Internationa l Developme nt Lab, Purdue University

PhD, in Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Purdue

Global Design Teams

Marissa Jablonski

Associate Researcher and Instructor

Sustainable Peacebuildi ng Master’s Program, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee

PhD in Civil/Environme ntal Engineering, UWM

Mentor of EWB-UWM student chapter

Gary Burniske

Managing Director

Center for Global Food Security, Purdue University

MS in Forest Economics, BS in Natural Resources Management, University of Massachusetts in Amherst

35 years of international (former Peace Corp volunteer)

David Frossard

Adjunct professor in Humanitarian Engineering

Colorado School of Mines

PhD, University of California at Irvine

Former Peace Corps volunteer and faculty advisor for student chapters of Engineers Without Borders, and others.

Table 3.6 continued

David Munoz

Retired faculty, Emeritus Associate Professor

Engineering Division, Colorado School of Mines

PhD, Purdue University

Working with non- profits in the areas generally designated as humanitarian or peace engineering. Former director of Mines’ HE program

Emily Wigley

Applications Engineer

Knowles Electronics

B.S. in Acoustical Engineering, Purdue

Former president of Engineers without Borders Chicagoland Professional Chapter

Kevin Passino Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University

PhD, University of Notre Dame

Director of the Humanitarian Engineering Center, The Ohio State University

Robin Semer Environmental Engineer AECOM

MS, Civil Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago

Member of EWB Chicagoland professional chapter

Mark Henderson Professor

Department of Engineering, ASU

PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University

Director of Global Resolve

Ken Kastman President

Earth-Whys, LLC

MSCE, Geotechnical Engineering, Purdue University

Member of EWB Chicagoland professional chapter

Robert Faculty R1 Univeristy PhD in an engineering field

Supervisor of global service-learning engineering projects

Michael International Humanitarian Engineering NGO

M.S. in an engineering field

Andrew Bridge Engineer Consultancy firm

M.S. in an engineering field

Volunteer for an International Humanitarian

Engineering NGO

George Faculty PhD Director of an international, interdisciplinary service-learning program

3.5.2 Elicitation of Practitioners’ Experience To elicit practitioners’ experience in HE projects, I interviewed them following a semi- structured protocol that included Flanagan’s (1954) Critical Incident Technique (CIT). Flanagan (1954) describes Critical Incidents (CI) as “extreme behavior, either outstandingly effective or ineffective with respect to attaining the general aims of activity” (p. 338). In CIT, the interviewer asks the interviewee to think about a time when the aims of the activities under study were achieved outstandingly well or badly. In this case, I was interested in activities that facilitated or hindered community participation in HE projects. The elicitation of CIs enabled me to understand challenges and needed pre- requisites associated with using some of the methods collected and analyzed during phase I and other broader consideration related to the practice of HE.

At the beginning of the interview, I asked interviewees a set of ‘grand tour questions’ (i.e., how did you get involved in HE? What do you usually do during a field visit?) (Spradley, 1979). Using this approach allowed me to frame and guide the subsequent discussion, including follow-up questions and probes (Spradley, 1979). During the first part of the interview, I also used CIT to elicit specific examples of extraordinary good or bad situations they encountered. Toward the end of the interview (usually after 45 min to 1 hour), I shared a four-page .pdf file that contained one-sentence descriptions and small visualizations of a selected sample of the methods acquired during phase 1. I selected a

sample of methods that represented most of the functions and all three participation levels. The goal was to provide a large enough range to elicit knowledge of the practitioners. Then, I asked them to go through the method and to comment on them. The goal was to gather their experiences using these methods and to elicit other experience using methods similar to those available. If they were not familiar with the methods, I also asked to comment on what limitations they could imagine and why they would prefer to use some methods and not others.

Some of the questions I asked them during the interview are: 1. What strategies do you usually use to involve community members during HE

projects? 2. What strategies have been proven more successful than others? Can you provide

some examples? 3. What do you think were the reason for the success/failure of using the strategy?

a. What could you have done to better prepare yourself? b. What would you suggest a novice to do to better prepare? c. What contextual factors may prevent the success of using the strategy? d. How did the local culture facilitate or hinder the use the strategy? e. What do you need to know or be able to do before using the strategy? f. If you could go back, what would you have done differently?

4. Please look at the set of methods contained in the .pdf I just sent you, have you ever used any of these methods?

a. What was your experience with those?

5. If you have never used them, would you be interested in using them? Why yes or why not?

a. What do you think may enable you to use these methods successfully? I conducted all the interviews on Skype, except for three interviews done in person.

Before the actual interview, I shared the details of the study and the consent form explaining the open-licensing process for publishing the transcript.

Before the interview, I presented the participants with two options. With option A, the participants accepted to have their name associated with the transcript and to publish it using a creative commons licenses. Before publishing the transcripts, the participants read the transcripts and modified them as they saw fit. Some of them rephrased sentences to make sure that the message they wanted to send was properly conveyed, others deleted sections that they did not feel comfortable to share. I analyzed the final transcript they shared with me.

With option B, the participants requested to conceal their identity and I anonymized their transcript to make sure their identity will be properly protected. These anonymized transcripts will not be published and will be maintained securely in my PC. All participants except one (Robert) chose option A. However, three participants (Michael, Andrew, and George) were not able to review the transcripts. After consulting with them; they decide to chance their choice to option B.

3.5.3 Interview Analysis I analyzed the transcripts of the interview with the practitioners using an inductive Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). They define TA as a rigorous method “for identifying, analyzing, and reporting pattern (themes) within data” (p.79), where a

theme “captures something important about the data in relation to the research question, and represents some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set” (p. 82). TA is a flexible method because is not “wedded to any pre-existing theoretical framework” (p.81) and therefore is compatible with various research paradigms (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In my analysis, I conducted TA in a constructionist framework because I “seek[s] to theorize the sociocultural contexts, and the structural conditions, that” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 85) facilitated community participation in HE projects.

For the analysis, Braun & Clarke (2006) suggest a six-step process to develop emergent codes and themes: 1) familiarizing yourself with your data, 2) generating codes, 3) searching for themes, 4) reviewing themes, 5) defining and naming themes, and 6) producing the report. However, Braun and Clarke’s (2006) process appears to be linear, while my analysis in reality was much more iterative and cyclic. In fact, rather than following a six-steps process, I followed three major steps: 1) familiarization with data (just like in Braun and Clarke (2006)), 2) development of codes and themes (which groups Braun and Clark’s (2006) steps 2 to 5 together), and 3) writing chapter 6 and 7 (which corresponds to Braun and Clark’s (2006) step 6). Familiarization with data. I read all 14 transcripts and while reading them I annotated possible codes and themes in 14 memos (one for each transcript). Then, I printed the memos and looked across them to identify commonalities. This process led me to divide all transcripts in two major parts. Part A comprised all the text of transcript with focus on discussion of methods (all the sections of transcripts where the interviewees commented on the methods I had shared with them). Part B contained all the remaining text which provided broader discussions related to the practice of HE. Then, I

proceeded with analyzing the two parts of transcripts independently. I started with the comments on methods and then with the rest of the transcript. Development of codes and themes. I first focused on analyzing the parts of transcripts that focused on comments related to the methods I had shared with them. The analysis of these segments of codes was very straightforward as four codes emerged very clearly from the first round of coding. Specifically, I created five codes: “Used,” “Familiar,” “Similar,” “Positives,” and “Negatives.” I coded with the code “Used” every time that they mentioned that they actually used a method, and coded with the code “Familiar,” when they stated they were familiar with the method, and “Similar” when they stated they had used something very similar. I then grouped these two codes in one major theme named familiarity, which referred to participants’ familiarity with the methods. I coded with the code “Positives,” every time the participants expressed a positive opinion regarding the methods, and with the code “Negatives,” every time the participants expressed a negative opinion. Further analysis of the text coded as “Positives,” led me to distinguish two types of positive opinions: 1) general appreciation of a method, and 2) specific benefit of using a method. Further analysis of the text coded as “Negatives,” led me to identify four main challenges associated using the methods: 1) practical, 2) communicational, 3) cultural, and 4) ethical. The results of this coding process are presented in chapter 6. The analysis of Part B of the transcripts was much more iterative. I first analyzed the text inductively and generated a large set of codes. Then, using sticky notes I grouped the codes together and created different clusters. After many of attempts, I obtained three major themes. The first theme was named “Definitions of Humanitarian Engineering”

and contained all instances in which participant provided a definition or insight related to the nature of HE practice. The second major theme was “Building Trusted Relationships,” which it contained three sub-themes: 1) benefits of trust, 2) project partner, and 3) social interactions. The last theme was named “Asset/Strength Based Approach,” as it referred to instances where participant mentioned and described the practice of asset based community development in the context of HE. This theme also contained one subtheme, “Local expertise,” which referred to instances where the participants talked about harnessing the expertise of the communities they were working in. Writing chapter 6 and 7. The last step of my analysis was writing the findings chapter 6 and 7 which aligned with Braun and Clarke’s (2006) producing the report. As suggested in their paper, writing the chapter was itself another analysis step I had to the coded text to select “vivid, compelling extract examples” (Braun & Clarck, 2006, p. 87) and order them in a way that properly exemplified my claims.

CHAPTER 4. GUIDING PRINCIPLES, METHODS, AND COMPETENCIES FOR PARTICIPATORY HUMANITARIAN ENGINEERING PROJECTS

This chapter focuses on the results of the content analysis of the 48 journal papers that were collected through a qualitative systematized review, as explain in chapter 3, section 3.3. All the collected journal papers discussed the importance of community participation in HE or similar projects. They all recognized that lack of community participation has led to project failure and therefore community participation and buy-in is a critical and essential factor of successful HE and similar projects. For instance, in Garfi and Ferrer- Mati’s (2011) project evaluation framework, “community participation and access” is one key criterion to evaluate the effectiveness of a project. Moreover, many papers suggest that involvement of community members in every stage of the projects leads to higher sense of ownership, which is directly linked with the long-term sustainability of solutions. All the papers discussed multiple approaches to ensure community participation.

More specifically, the content analysis of the papers revealed five guiding principles, seven groups of methods, and three very broad competencies that inform and may lead to meaningful participation of community members in humanitarian and similar projects. Principles are abstract guidelines that need to be taken into account when doing HE projects. Methods comprise a variety of tools and techniques that translate the

principles into practice. Competencies are abilities that enable engineers or engineering students to enact the guiding principles and to use the methods appropriately. In the next sections, I will report the findings related to these three major themes.

4.1 Guiding Principles Every one of the 48 journal articles described at least one principle that could guide engineers to facilitate community participation in HE projects. Specifically, I identified five guiding principles: 1) collaborating with local partners, 2) harnessing local resources and expertise, 3) considering ethics, human rights, and social justice, 4) building trusting and equitable relationships, and 5) creating multi/inter-disciplinary teams. In the following sections, I will describe each principle in detail.

4.1.1 Collaborating With on-the-Ground Partners A large group of papers mentioned that collaborating with a partner on the-ground that is committed to both the community and the project is one of the best ways to make sure that community members are appropriately involved in the projects. A committed local partner can “play an integral role in facilitating communication and a common language and understanding between the parties based on their deeper knowledge of the local culture” (Chisolm et al., 2014). In her analysis of the winning projects from the first five MIT IDEAS Competitions (an annual competition that awards prizes to student teams that have created solutions for underserved communities), Jue (2006) similarly found that “collaborate with a solid community partner” was one of six factors for the sustainability of any solution. For instance, she found that “the technology created through the Innovative Drinking Water Project is still being disseminated by the project’s community partner, a scientific nongovernmental organization, even though the student team leader

left the country, and Nepal’s political situation prevented new students from coming into the country” (Jue, 2006, p. 26). Therefore, the committed project partner ensured the long-term success of the technology even if the student team was not able to go back to the country where they implemented the solution.

In contrast, Jue (2006) observed that projects that had unstable projects partners or no partner were not sustainable and quickly ended. For instance, she shared the example of a student team that developed an automated early warning system that monitored the river and weather conditions in a small region of Honduras. A reason that the project was not successful in the long run was that the team collaborated with an organization that had internal issues. The internal issue of the project partner led to the resignation of one leader of the organization, who was also the main contact and the champion for the student team. The person who took the place of their project champion was not as committed to the project as the pervious leader and the student team lost the support that was needed to continue the project. In line with Jue’s (2006) suggestion, I found that the authors of the articles have worked and/or suggested collaborating with a wide range of partners. For instance, Aslam et al (2014), Barb and Everett (2014), and Ones (2013) collaborated with Peace Corps Volunteers, who were located in the communities were the projects were undertaken. Many papers also cited local and international non-governmental organizations as prospective partners (NGOs, e.g., Aslam et al, 2013; Bowen & Acciaioli, 2015; Chilsom et al., 2014; Dodson and Barbach, 2015; Ferrer-Marti, 2010; Harshfield et al., 2009; Magee et al., 2011; Matson and Wood, 2014; Third et al., 2009). In addition to NGOs, engineers could collaborate with existing local committees, cooperatives, or governing

bodies (Aslam, 2014; Barb and Everett, 2014; de Chatonay et al., 2012; Heil et al., 2010; Marsolek et al., 2012), local Universities (Harshfield et al., 2009; Maggon et al., 2010), or individual community members, such as health workers (Barb and Everett, 2014). The key is to find local gatekeepers that can provide access to the community, broker relationships, and support the project while the foreign engineers or other professionals are not in the country (Mehta and Mehta, 2011; Pearson, 1996; Sianipar et al., 2013). Sometimes, supporting organizations might be created in addition to the existing ones. For instance, Ferrer-Mati et al. (2010) facilitated the establishment of a microenterprise composed by residents of the community to take over operation and maintenance of the systems that were installed. Similarly, Munoz (2015), with the help of a local social scientist, encouraged the creation of “circle of friends,” small groups of local women who got together to embark on small projects, some of which became microenterprises. The creation of small groups not only ensures that systems can be maintained, but also build local capacity and interdependency.

4.1.2 Harnessing Local Resources and Expertise Equally important to collaborating with solid community partners is the principle of harnessing the existing natural and human resources available in the community. As Murphy et al. (2009) observe, “a tool made from local materials by local tradesman will likely be more affordable and sustainable than an imported tool from the developed world” (p. 160). To reflect this principle, Garfi and Ferrer-Mati’s (2011) decision-making framework for selecting appropriate technology considers the percentage of local materials and resources used in developing technologies as a decisive indicator to assess the potential success and sustainability of a solution. One specific strategy to identify

local resources and materials is that of surveying local stores and vendors (Aslam et al., 2014; Barb and Everett, 2014; Magoon et al., 2010; Nieusma and Riley, 2010). Looking beyond materials, the most important resource of a community is its people. Mattson and Wood (2014) cite Murcott’s (2007) hallmarks of co-design, one of which being that designers must recognize that “resource-poor individuals have valuable expertise in surviving in low resource environments and in understanding local materials and networks” (p. 2). Similarly, McDaniel et al. (2011) observed that the community where they were working did not have extensive financial capital, but was rich with local technical experts, such as bricklayers, carpenters, and other specialized construction workers. It is indeed common that engineers and designers may harness such local expertise. For instance, de Chastonay et al. (2012) collaborated closely with local brick makers who “mastered the creation of insulating bricks” (p. 59). Similarly, Hussain and Sanders (2012) worked with a local sculptor to “develop models of feet in clay” of prosthetic legs for underserved Cambodian children. To make sure that local expertise was properly integrated in the project, Ramirez et al. (2010) invited some community members to be part of the design team. In light of this fact, Nieusma and Riley (2010) criticize students’ involvement in these kinds of projects because they point out that engineering students might have little to offer and what they offer might already be readily available in the country. Yet, regardless of whether students’ involvement is advised, harnessing local expertise and resources remains a fundamental guideline to any humanitarian engineering or similar project.

4.1.3 Considering Ethics, and Social Justice Many papers advise that engineers need to consider issues related to ethics and social justice. For instance, engineers think about the ethical issues related to doing research with people in developing countries (Hilton et al., 2014). To make sure that they were adhering to proper ethical standards related to research, Aslam et al. (2014), de Chastoney et al. (2012), Harshifield et al. (2009), Magoon et al. (2010), followed research ethical protocols that got IRB approval. Taking into account ethical issues while interacting with community members avoid distrust (Hilton et al., 2014).

Amadei et al., (2009) states that engineers are always “bound to a professional code of ethics with regard to behavior, accountability, quality control and quality assurance, and delivery of projects” (p. 1094). However, professional codes of ethics provide useful, but limited ethical guidelines (Leydens and Lucena, 2014). To be able to fully and effectively collaborate with community members, engineers need to consider social justice issues (Vandersteen et al., 2009), such as addressing the effect of root causes and structural conditions of a problem (Bernadei et al., 2009; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Nieusma and Riley, 2010; Pearson, 1996), mitigating power differentials between engineers and community members (Hilton et al., 2014; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Murphy et al., 2009; Nieusma and Riley, 2010), increasing opportunities, mitigating imposed risks and harms, and enhancing human capabilities (Leydens and Lucena, 2014), and respecting human-rights (Bayars et al., 2009; Bowen and Acciaioli, 2015).

Most important to the social justice literature is the idea of power and how power differentials might prevent real collaborations between engineers and community members. There is therefore a need to shift power relations, which could be obtained by

positioning students (and engineers more broadly) in roles of learners before actually attempting to solve any existing problem (Nieusma and Riley, 2010). Another way to break traditional power relationships would be to follow a rights-based approach, which “recognizes individuals as actors in their own development instead of viewing them as victims” (Bayars et al., 2009, p. 2714). In sum, in order to meaningfully collaborate with community members, engineers need to follow approved research protocols, follow ethical guidelines, and take measures to shift power dynamics to a more equal level.

4.1.4 Building Trusting Relationships This fifth principle is directly related to the previous one because “acting ethically at all times and avoiding decisions that lead to distrust and suspicion is another factor that leads to trust-based relationship building” (Hilton et al., 2014, p. X). However, ethical decision-making is not the only factor that contributes to trust. Maintaining equitable relationships that ensure an appropriate distribution of contributions of money, energy, and time among all people involved in a project is often associated with higher levels of trust (Aslam et al., 2014; Hilton et al., 2014; Mehta and Mehta, 2011). Other factors that foster trusted relationships include open communication, respect, reciprocity, and transparency (Aslam et al., 2014; Aslam et al., 2013; Chisolm et al., 2014; de Chastonay et al., 2012). Trust appears to be directly related to the time that engineers spend with community members, although it is not clear what is the minimum time necessary and what kind of activities may best foster trust (Garff et al., 2013; Hilton et al., 2014; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Munoz, 2014). While building trust seems to be a very important principle for successful HE projects, the literature I retrieved is limited on this topic and further research is needed.

4.1.5 Creating Diverse and Multidisciplinary Teams Finally, a small set of papers reports on the importance of having diverse team members that can contribute to both the technical, and, especially, the social aspects of HE and similar projects (Jue, 2011; Leydens and Lucena, 2009). This is because the nature of the problems addressed in these projects “requires knowledge, skills, and sensitivity in social, political, technical, ecological, and economic factors” (Mattson and Wood, 2014, p. X). Teams should include members from multiple disciplines, including “sociologists, economists, anthropologists, public health experts” (Amadei et al., 2010, p. 6). For instance, in Dodson and Barbach’s (2015) fogwater harvesting project, social scientists played a key role in conducting robust household surveys of water usage, while Magoon et al. (2010) relied on a local anthropologist to involve the community in their project. In sum, engineers and engineering students are strongly advised to deploy “models that successfully blur disciplinary boundaries and de-center engineering as the key expertise in addressing development problems” (Nieusma and Riley, 2010, p. 57).

4.2 Methods to Involve Communities The five principles described above provide guidance on what engineers should take into account to facilitate community participation in HE and similar projects. However, in order to meet these principles in practice, engineers need to deploy a wide range of specific methods. Among the 48 papers I collected, 38 papers discussed sets of methods to facilitate community participation. I organized these methods in seven groups: 1) social science research methods, 2) design tools, 3) participatory methods, 4) evaluation and decision-making tools, and 5) stakeholder identification methods, 6) self-awareness tools, and 7) miscellaneous. In this section, I provide a general overview of the methods

that were discussed, while in the next chapter (Chapter 6) I will provide a more detailed analysis of these methods, including the classification system I developed.

4.2.1 Social Science Research Methods The most common methods proposed and used in the 48 papers are research methods derived from the social sciences. A great example of how social science research methods can inform design of products for underserved communities comes from Winter (2006). The goal of Winter’s (2006) study was to assess the “current state of wheelchair technology in Tanzania and the factors that prevent Tanzania’s disabled from utilizing wheelchair technology” (p. 60). To achieve his goal, Winter (2006) conducted 99 interviews with users, manufactures, and advocacy groups. Thus, he identified a set of issues that later informed his final design. In other projects, a wider range of social science research methods were used. For instance, Ferrer-Martí et al (2010) describe the main aspects of designing, implementing, and managing a small-scale electricity generation system that harnessed wind energy in a small community in Peru. One important part of their process was a socioeconomic analysis focused on understanding “the following characteristics of the families [of the community]: social, economic, energy consumption and demand, organizational level, identification of individual and group capabilities” (p. 280). To achieve this goal they used a wide range of social science research methods, including “socioeconomic surveys of each family, interviews with local authorities and representative residents and a focus group with the local organizations and representatives” (p. 280).

Overall, the social science research methods that were used or suggested in the 48 papers included interviews (Aslam et al., 2013; Ferrer-Mati et al., 2010; Garfi and Ferrer-

Mati, 2011; Magee et al., 2011; Magoon et al., 2010; Marsolek et al., 2012; Mehta and Mehta, 2014; Ramirez et al., 2010; Tendick-Matesanz et al., 2012; Third et al., 2009), focus groups (Chisolm et al., 2014; Ferrer-Mati et al., 2010; Heil et al., 2010; Mehta and Mehta, 2011), surveys (Barb and Everett, 2011; Ferrer-Mati et al., 2010; Harshfield et al., 2009; Heil et al., 2010; Magee et al., 2011; Mattson and Wood, 2014; Ogunyoku et al., 2011; Ruth et al., 2013), and observations (Garff et al., 2013; Magoon et al., 2010). However, when the authors of the papers discussed the social science research methods they used, none of them cited sources that informed how they created their research protocols, which suggests that engineers might not be doing due diligence when deploying such methods.

4.2.2 Design Tools A smaller set of papers used or suggested to use design tools, which themselves include social science research methods, such as interviews and focus groups. Dodson and Barbach (2015), for instance, mention “user-centered design techniques” (p. 191), but did not cite any specific source. In contrast, Leydens and Lucena cite IDEO’s human- centered design cards as a “useful vehicle for engendering empathy” (p. 16). Hussain and Sanders (2012) utilized generative design tools to develop prosthetic legs for marginalized children. They explain that generative design tools are “a category of participatory design methods characterized by the application of materials that have been designed to facilitate non-designers in articulating their needs and dreams in the form of design proposals” (p. 44). Specifically, there are three types of generative design tools: 1) making tools like collages, maps, models, and mock-ups, 2) telling tools like diaries, logs, and sorting cards, and 3) enacting tools like role-playing and improvisation. Specifically,

Hussain et al., (2012) used making tools to allow children to draw prototypes of prosthetic legs. The last example of design tools is the Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology that Walton and Derenzi (2009) used to develop a health-care information system for community health workers in East Africa. VSD “enables system designers to comprehensively address values throughout the design process” (p. 347). Specifically, it requires designers to use social science research methods to understand what their direct users’ value, and then integrate the identified values in every aspect of the design process.

4.2.3 Participatory Methods Another set of papers mentioned methods that draw upon participatory methodologies, such as participatory action research (Aslam et al., 2013; Bernadei et al., 2009; de Chastoney et al., 2012; Magoon et al., 2010; Ramirez et al., 2010; White, 1997), community based participatory research (Tendick-Matesanz et al., 2015), and theater of the oppressed (Ones, 2013). For example, Amadei et al. (2009) suggest that engineers could employ participatory methods that “include Rapid Rural Appraisal, Rapid Assessment Methods, Behavior Change Communication, and others” (p. 1097) and cite Beebe’s (2011) manual for rapid assessment methods. Ramirez et al. (2010) mentioned an approach named “Participatory Rural Diagnostic.” This approach include methods such as “talking maps” which “provided visual information on the conformation of the territory and the arrangement of items such as neighborhoods, streets, hospitals, farms, and wells” (p. 53). However, they fail to cite the direct source for those methods.

White (1997) proposes to use “Participatory Appraisal of Needs and the Development of Action” (PANDA) which combines Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Issue Structuring Methods (ISMs). PRA is a process that includes participatory

action research methods focused on understanding the sociocultural context of community through the active participation of the community in both data collection and analysis. White (1997) mentions transects, wealth ranking, analysis of difference, and ranking among some of the methods used in PRA, but does not provide detailed description nor cite sources on where to find more information related to these methods. ISMs instead are highly structured techniques that provide guidance in making decisions and create action plans. White (1997) mentions comparative advantage, commitment packages, and action methods as part of the ISM family, but, as in the case of PRA methods, does not include detailed description of the methods nor cite original sources.

Aslam et al. (2013) used photovoice, a specific participatory action research method, which was developed by Wang and Burris (1997) in the context of health care provision. Specifically, Aslam et al. (2013) gave cameras to thirteen community members, who had five days to take pictures of “features that were important to certain individuals, were in need of improvement, or were significant” (p. 39) to the them and the community. The photovoice participants then presented their pictures to other participants and other community members. The whole process allowed the participants to identify important issues that affected the community and its members. As a last example of participatory methods, it is worth mentioning the non-traditional (for engineering) approach used by Ones (2013). Building upon tradition such as August Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Ones (2013) used community-performed skits with talk-back sessions to instigate community discussions about fuel efficient stoves. This approach helped provide vocal empowerment to women, who were then able to participate more meaningfully to discussions regarding cooking and stoves.

4.2.4 Stakeholder Identification Methods To make sure that a wide range of stakeholders are involved in a project, engineers need to identify all possible stakeholders of a projects. A small set of papers discussed approaches to achieve this goal. To identify all stakeholders of a development project and understand how they interact with each other, Bowen and Acciaioli (2015) proposed to use an arena model that is built on collective action theory. Their arena model recognizes five types of stakeholders: “providers of resources for the change; planners of the change; implementers of the change; subjects of the change; and beneficiaries of the change” (p. 279). In contrast, in Mehta and Metha’s (2011) Stakeholder Analysis method, stakeholders are grouped in 1) primary stakeholders, i.e., “those directly affected” (p. 37), 2) secondary stakeholders who “include ‘intermediaries’ that are indirectly affected” (p. 37), 3) Tertiary stakeholders like funding agencies, and 4) marginalized stakeholders, that “have traditionally not been involved in the domain of the project, generally due to various social and economic reasons” (p. 37).

Following a different logic, Leydens and Lucena (2014) proposed to use a rainbow diagram, a social analysis system that maps “the various actors according to who has influence (most, moderate, and least) and who could be (most, moderately, or least) affected” by any HE project (p. 11). Another way to characterize stakeholders is to look at three indicators: Place, People, and Prospect (Sianipar et al., 2013). Place is defined as “the bond a person has in him/herself to the place where he/she lives” (p. 3392). People means that “a person has a good opinion on what people do locally, and has a clear understanding of local people’s capabilities on managing existing conditions” (p.3392). And finally, the Prospect indicator “shows a person’s dedication to future development of

local area” (p. 3393). While identifying and characterizing stakeholders is one of the first steps to allow community participation, only a few papers explicitly discussed those methods, although (as I will discuss in chapter 5) many design tools and participatory methods include some form of stakeholders’ identification processes.

4.2.5 Evaluation and Decision-Making Tools While the groups of methods reported in the above subsections (4.2.1-4) focus on learning about the problem, the context, and other aspects of a project, there was a smaller set of papers that discussed methods to make decisions. Avrai and Post (2011) developed a risk management framework “for involving affected stakeholders in decisions about POU water treatment systems” (p. 69). Similarly, Garfi and Ferrer-Marti (2011) developed a comprehensive Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) process to evaluate water and sanitation projects. Specifically, the MCA is based on four groups of criteria: “technical (e.g. local resources use, appropriate management); social (e.g. local community participation, overcoming discrimination of conflict); economic (e.g. low cost, employment of local staff) and environmental criteria (e.g. atmospheric emissions, water pollution)” (p. 83). A similar framework was developed by McConville and Mihelcic (2007). Their approach evaluates solutions based on five sustainability factors, i.e., “1) sociocultural respect, 2) community participation, 3) political cohesion, 4) economic sustainability, 5) environmental sustainability.” (McConville & Mihelcic, 2007, p. 937).

In contrast, Leydens and Lucena (2014) use a different approach to evaluate possible designs. They developed the Design Evaluation Matrix on Human Capabilities that ranks possible designs based on their potential to enhance Nussbaum’s positive freedoms (Nussbaum, 2007). Specifically, Nussbaum’s positive freedoms are

conceptualized as 10 human capabilities: “1) life (of a normal length), 2) bodily health, 3) bodily integrity (like freedom from assault, etc.), 4) senses, imagination, and thought, 5) emotions, 6) practical reason, 7) affiliation, 8) other species (respect for nature in general), 9) play, and 10) control over one’s political environment” (Leydens and Lucena, 2014, p. 17). Community members can use these capabilities at multiple project phases, from describing the outcomes of their dreams and aspirations to evaluating designs and the long-term effectiveness of the project. Finally, both Mattson and Wood (2014) and Mehta and Mehta (2011) suggest that engineers should use failure analysis methods to assess the potential of failure of the systems. The above frameworks and methods are some the many methods that were suggested for making-decision and evaluate solutions.

4.2.6 Self-Awareness Tools The tools so far focused on enabling engineers to gather and frame information, but also to make decisions. Two papers (Hinton et al., 2014; Leydens and Lucena, 2014), however, proposed that in addition to discovering the community and its context, engineers should also employ tools for self-discovery that would allow raising awareness related of their own biases and assumptions. For instance, Hinton et al. (2014) suggest that engineers could undertake reflective exercises that would allow them to understand “their own style of action and how it differs from the actions of their partners and stakeholders” (p. 6). Similarly, to promote awareness of race, gender, social class, and other privileges, engineers could do The Privilege Walk and Privilege by Numbers activities before beginning interactions with their project partners (Leydens and Lucena, 2014). The

collected literature was quite limited on pointing out specific self-awareness tools. However, some design toolkits that I retrieved through snowballing (see section 3.4), include self-awareness tools that I report in Chapter 5.

4.2.7 Miscellaneous Finally, a set of papers discuss an array of methods that did not belong exactly in any of the six categories mentioned above. To begin, a group of papers discussed leveraging community meetings during which engineers had discussions about a wide range of topics with community members and leaders (Aslam et al., 2014; Barb and Everett, 2014; de Chastonay et al., 2012; Harshfield et al., 2009; Magoon et al., 2010; Marsolek et al., 2007; McDaniel et al., 201; Ogunyouku et al., 2011; Pvalik et al., 2013; Tendick- Matesanz et al., 2015). However, none of the papers really explained what specific activities were undertaken to open the ground for meaningful discussions and sharing of information and ideas. Magoon et al. (2010) came up their own strategy to share information and receive feedback from the community. They installed a message boards at the two village stores, where they “posted our current and planned activities and encouraged questions or comments to be written anonymously on the supplied writing pad” (p. 51). Then, they would read comments and opinions the community members posted and responded to these directly on the message board. Other papers preferred to rely on existing manuals of methods. Chisolm et al. (2014) used “hygiene evaluation procedures” (Almedom et al., 1997) that are typically deployed by Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH)-focused organizations to “solicit behaviors and opinions from community members without directing questioning” (p. 533). Instead, Garff et al. (2013) suggested integrating social science research methods

with Social Impact Assessment frameworks (such as Burdge, 2004), “which emphasizes obtaining critical data about the users and their community context in order to assess the effectiveness of solutions developed” (p. 138).

4.3 Competencies The third major theme that emerged from my analysis relates to competencies that engineers need to have in order to facilitate community participation in engineering projects. This theme was, however, underrepresented as compared to guiding principles and methods. In fact only 18 papers out of the 48 collected, and only one fully unpacked a specific competency (i.e., contextual listening in Leydens and Lucena (2009)). I grouped the competencies in three very broad categories: 1) mindsets, beliefs, attitudes, and self-awareness, 2) cross-cultural skills, and 3) communication and listening skills.

4.3.1 Mindsets, Beliefs, Attitudes, and Self-Awareness Of the papers that mentioned competencies, one set of papers discussed mindsets and attitudes that can allow for meaningful interaction with community members. Aslam et al. (2014) and Vandersteen et al (2009) state that a humble mindset and a sense of humility may lead engineers to embrace more cooperative-oriented approaches to HE. Bayars et al. (2009), Hussain et al. (2012), and Schneider et al. (2008) recognize that the beliefs that engineers hold about underserved communities can hinder or enhance community participation. For instance, Bayars et al. (2009) explain that by taking a rights-based approach, engineers will be able to see underserved communities as “actors in their own development instead of viewing them as victims” (p. 2714) who are waiting to be saved by foreigners. In order to develop such a belief about others, engineers also need to acquire high degrees of empathy (Hilton et al., 2014; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Mattson

and Wood, 2014). Specifically, Schneider et al. (2009) suggest that empathy is “crucial to re-envisioning a community not exclusively through the lens of what it lacks, but through its multiple social, cultural, and other assets and capacities, and most of all its own dreams and aspirations” (p. 47). Competencies such as having a humble mindset, humility, beliefs regarding other people, and empathy are meta-cognitive traits that focus on others. However, a few papers also discuss how a focus on self may also further promote better interactions and especially mitigate power differentials. In order to do so, engineers need to develop a deep awareness of their own preunderstandings, assumptions, and unconscious biases that their own background may have shaped (Aslam et al., 2014; Hilton et al., 2014; Hussain et al., 2012; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Niesuma and Riley, 2010; Pearson, 1996). White (1997) calls this trait “critical self-awareness,” which requires that engineers examine their behavior and offset their biases.

4.3.2 Ability to Navigate Cross-Cultural Differences One key principle of appropriate technology is that a technology must be socially and culturally appropriate for the community where the solution is implemented (Hussain and Sanders, 2010; Murphy et al., 2009; Ogunyoku et al., 2011). This means that engineers need to take into consideration the “socio-cultural, political, economic, and other systems that inform and are informed by community identity, values, and aspirations” (Schneider et al., 2008, p. 313). Yet, the cultural and contextual differences do not only influence the technology itself, but also the interactions between the community members and the engineers (Bowen and Acciaioli, 2015; Heil et al., 2010; McConville and Mihelcic, 2007; Pearson, 1996). Differences in culture, language, and values can affect how engineers can

collaborate with community members (Avrai et al., 2012; Chisolm et al., 2014; Harshfield et al., 2009; Hussain and Sanders, 2012). For instance, in a project focused on developing prosthetic legs for disadvantaged Cambodian children, Hussain et al. (2012) had to change the way they asked questions to children due to local Buddhist beliefs:

“[A]ccording to Buddhist beliefs, one should never show ingratitude. Consequently, we had to rephrase some questions so that the children would not be worried about criticising. Instead of asking the children what they did not like about the prototypes, for example, we asked them what they really liked about them and what they liked a little less” (p. 99)

Therefore, engineers need to be able to understand how the local beliefs and values may shape interactions and adapt their behavior to navigate such differences (Garff et al., 2013); otherwise it could lead to misunderstandings, and harmful consequences.

4.3.3 Communication and Listening Skills Finally, communication and listening skills were explicitly cited by a few authors (Leydens and Lucena, 2009, 2014; Nieusma and Riley, 2010; White, 1997). Most importantly, Leydens and Lucena (2009) position contextual listening as a key ability for humanitarian engineers. To understand contextual listening is important to distinguish it from basic listening, which “refers to hearing or paying attention to the verbal and nonverbal messages of any speaker” and “is framed as a dyadic process of speaking (output) and hearing/receiving information (input)” (Lucena et al., 2010 p. 124). On the other hand, contextual listening is complex, multidimensional, and integrated process where “information such as cost, weight, technical specs, desirable functions, and timeline acquires meaning only when the context of the person(s) making the

requirements (their history, political agendas, desires, forms of knowledge, etc.) is fully understood” ((Lucena et al., 2010, p. 125). Contextual listening is so important for HE that Leydens and Lucena (2014) include it as a criterion to achieve social justice in HE.

4.4 Chapter Summary In this chapter, I reported on the results of the content analysis that I conducted on the 48 papers that I retrieved using a qualitative systematized review. My analysis resulted in three major themes: guiding principles, methods, and competencies. Guiding principles and methods were widely discussed in the collected literature, which allowed me to develop sub-themes within each of them. By contrast, competencies were not discussed very often in the collected papers. To note, with this analysis it was not possible to understand the connections between guiding principles, methods, and competencies, although a few links could be proposed. For instance, all the competencies would allow engineers to properly use all the cited methods, like in the quoted example from Hussain et al. (2012) in which they changed their interview protocol to align with the local Buddhist beliefs. Creating multidisciplinary teams (principle 4.1.5) would allow a broader range of methods to be deployed during a project, as member of different disciplines would contribute with their own processes for learning and making decisions. The stakeholder identification methods can enable engineers to collaborate with a wide range of local and international stakeholders (principle 4.1.1). There is also a direct link between self-awareness tools (4.2.6) and the need to develop critical self-awareness (4.3.1), which in turn can promote egalitarian relationships (4.1.3). Furthermore, developing the proper mindsets and beliefs, and an ability of critical self-examination would allow engineers to appreciate and harness local expertise (principle 4.1.2), meet

ethical, human rights, and social justice criteria (principle 4.1.3), as well as build trusted relationships with community members (principle 4.1.4). Finally, through the content analysis, I identified seven groups of methods. This grouping provides only a general view of the methods that have been used and proposed in the HE and related literature, but it does not identify key characteristics that enable to compare and contrast the methods across all the groups. To really understand how these methods could differ, I had to further analyze the single methods to identify dimensions that cut across all the methods. The result of this analysis is a two-dimensional classification system that is presented in the next chapter. In chapter 7, I report findings related to my interviews with the practitioners, which overlap with and expand on some of the principles reported in this chapter, including harnessing local expertise (4.1.2), building trusting relationships (4.1.4), and creating multidisciplinary teams (4.1.5).

CHAPTER 5. PASSIVE, CONSULTATIVE, AND CO-CONSTRUCTIVE METHODS

In chapter 4 I reported the results from analyzing the papers that I collected through a qualitative systematized review. The analysis of the papers led me to create six families of methods: 1) social science research methods (4.2.1), 2) design tools, (4.2.2), 3) participatory methods (4.2.3), 4) stakeholder identification methods (4.2.4), 5) self- awareness tools (4.2.5), and 6) miscellaneous (4.2.6). However, this grouping does not enable comparison and contrast of the methods based on characteristics such as their purpose, the level of community involvement, and others. Therefore, to further understand the methods and better answer my first set of research questions, I further analyzed the methods reported and cited in the papers collected through the systematized review.

The iterative and creative analysis and classification process described in chapter 3, section 3.4.2, led me to develop a classification system that can be represented as a 3x3 matrix, reported in Figure 5.1. The columns are organized around three levels of community participation, i.e., 1) passive, 2) consultative, and 3) co-constructive. Passive methods were the most common, being 39% (25 out of 64) of all the methods collected. Co-constructive methods were the second most common, comprising 36% (23 of 64)

methods collected and the consultative methods were the least common with 16 out of 64 (25%). Notably, some consultative methods, as explained later in this chapter, can serve multiple goals. Thus even if they are smaller in number, they provide a large range of usage. The rows are organized around three major project phase: 1) problem definition and planning, 2) information gathering, and 3) solution development. The information- gathering phase is the one that contains the most methods (32, 50%) and is further divided in five function groups. The problem framing and planning phase is the second largest and includes 17 (27%) methods. This phase is further divided in four function groups. The solution development phase contains the remaining 15 methods (23%) and is divided in two function groups. Figure 5.1 reports a visualization two-dimensional framework and for each row the number of methods classified under each column. In the following pages, I first provide an overview of the level of community participation and explain the differences between the three levels (section 5.1). Then, I describe in more detail each project phase and the associated function groups (section 5.2). I finish by discussing different approaches to think about using methods and I relate them back to some of the findings reported in chapter 4.

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5.1 Dimension 1: Levels of Community Participation

The participation levels were created by combining three different aspects of participation, as illustrated in figure 5.2. The first aspect is who participates while the other aspects two describe the specific actions and roles taken by the participants. In terms of participants, the analyzed methods provide only two scenarios: 1) the participants include only the engineers, and 2) the participants include engineers and local community members (shorten to locals from here on). To note is that there were no

Figure 5.1. Two-Dimensional Use-Inspired Framework to Classify Methods

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methods in which the only participants were community members. This reflects the fact that this study focus on projects, like in service-learning courses, in which engineers cannot be taken out of the equation. Based on this characteristic, co-constructive and consultative methods distinguish themselves from passive methods because they include locals. However, the distinction between consultative and co-constructive is based on what engineers and locals do when the methods are used. In consultative methods, engineers elicit information from locals who simply provide the information requested which is then interpreted by the engineers. In co-constructive methods the locals co- construct an artifact or a piece of knowledge based on their own understanding and guided by the engineers, who function as facilitators in the process. Specific examples to illustrate these differences are provided in the following sub-sections.

Figure 5.2. Levels of Community Participation

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5.2 Dimension 2: Project Phase While the columns organize methods based on levels of community participation, the rows are organized around three major project phases, i.e., 1) problem framing and planning, 2) context-related information gathering, and 3) solution development. While I ordered the project phases in a linear, sequential fashion, this does not mean that engineers should necessarily follow this specific order, because the reality is that projects are iterative and cyclic. Within each project phase, the methods are grouped together based on their specific goal, as illustrated in figure 5.1. For example, within the Problem Framing and Planning phase, there are four function-groups based on four distinct, but related objectives a) to understanding a problem, b) to formulate goals or objectives, c) to rank goals or objectives, and d) to plan a project. In the sub-sections below, I report passive, consultative, and co-constructive methods belonging to each project phase and specific goal and explain how they fit in each category.

5.2.1 Problem Framing and Planning Methods This first group of methods comprises 17 (27%) of methods that can enable engineers to identify community problems and project objectives. These methods are grouped based on four distinct, but related functions: 1) to understand a problem, 2) to formulate project objectives, 3) to rank and select goals and objectives, and 4) plan a project in order to solve a problem and/or achieve an objective. As reported in table 5.1, the Problem Framing and Planning methods I analyzed are mostly co-constructive, with only 1 consultative method, and 6 passive methods. In the sub-sections below, I describe, compare, and contrast passive, consultative, and co-constructive methods within each of the three function groups.

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Table 5.1. Problem Framing and Planning Methods Passive Consultative Co-constructive To understand a problem

Inspiration in new place Frame the challenge

Gaps and conflicts Causal dynamics Force field Problem tree Timeline

To formulate objectives or goals

Back-it-Out 0 Ideal Scenario Option domain

To rank objectives 0 0

Problem Ranking Matrix Competing goals Priority Ranking

To plan a project

Order and Chaos Tools Matrix 0

The community action plan

5.2.1.1 Methods to understand a problem The first subset of methods has the common function to enable formulating and defining problems to be addressed in projects. In this subset, there are two passive methods, “Frame the design challenge” and “Inspiration in new Places” by IDEO (2014), that help designers to respectively scaffold a design challenge and get a fresh perspective on a problem. Chevalier and Buckles (2008) provide a consultative method named “Gaps and Conflicts.” With this technique, engineers can consult community members to understand the nature of the problem to be addressed in the project. Specifically, it helps understand if the problem at hand is “mostly about gaps or conflicts in power, interests (gains and losses), moral values, or information and communication” (p. 133). The four co-constructive methods in this sub-set are all from Chevalier and Buckles’s (2008) field guide. With the “Timeline” method, community members co-

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construct a timeline to visualize how they believe a problem originated and evolved over time. With “Problem Tree,” community members create together a tree that connects first and second-level causes and effects of a problem. The “Causal Dynamics” method enables community members to identify how the causes of a problem interact with each other. Lastly, with the “Force Field” method, community members can distinguish forces that cause a problem and those that counter attack it. All of these methods are executed during a workshop, during which facilitators (e.g., engineers) provide directions and instructions and the community members create the artifact (a timeline, a problem tree…) associated with each method. 5.2.1.2 Methods to Formulate Objectives or Goals In conjunction with or as an alternative to formulate problems, some methods focus on developing objectives or goals. The IDEO’s method “Back it Out” (a passive method) transform the challenge identified with the “Frame the challenge” method into possible objectives and areas of opportunities. Chevalier and Buckles’s (2008) “Option Domain” and “Ideal Scenario” are co-constructive methods in which community members develop unranked lists of objectives. 5.2.1.3 Methods to Rank Problems or Objectives In many cases, in one community there might be a set of problems to address. Thus, it becomes necessary to rank problems and objectives to decide with should be tackled first. The three co-constructive methods that constitute this sub-set all have in common the goal of ranking problems or objectives. The “Problem Ranking Matrix” (Freudenberger, 2008) is an exercise in which the community members with the facilitation of the engineers construct a matrix to rank selected problems. The rows of the matrix are

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problems while the columns are criteria that the community members selected in order to prioritize the problems. Similarly, “Competing Goals” by Chevalier and Buckles (2008) and “Priority Ranking” by PeaceCorps (2005) are other two co-constructive methods that engineers can use in collaboration with community members to rank objectives. 5.2.1.4 Methods to Plan a Project Once problems have been defined and/or objectives have been selected, there is need to plan the next activities for a project. This fourth and last set of Problem Framing and Planning methods comprises techniques that allow planning activities for the accomplishment of the project. The three passive planning methods are “A.R.T.” and “Order and Chaos” by Chevalier and Buckles (2008) and the “Tool Matrix” by Freudenberger (2008). The “A.R.T” (Action-Research-Training) allows engineers to evaluate what actions and how much research and training are needed to achieve project objectives and to balance these three aspects. Instead, the “Order and Chaos” method helps estimate the chances to achieve a project goal by using a scale from 0 to 10. The third passive method is the “Tool Matrix” that allows matching types of information needed to achieve a goal with tools that could be used to obtain these type of information. This tool is particularly useful to select methods described in other sections, such as the methods described in section 5.2. In this group of methods, there was only one co-constructive method and no consultative methods. The co-constructive method is “Community Action Plan” by Freudenberger (2008). This method allows the community members to decide project activities and responsibilities with the support of the engineers and/or external stakeholders. Thus, the community creates a matrix listing activities and responsibilities

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that would be displayed in a place where all the community would be able to see. The role of the engineers is to facilitate the meeting in which the community members construct their project plan.

5.2.2 Information Gathering Methods This second group of methods comprises 32 (50%) of methods that can enable engineers to gather information about the people and the context of a community. These methods are grouped based on five distinct, but related functions: 1) to foster-self-awareness, 2) multipurpose data collecting and analyzing, 3) to understand socio-cultural, political, and economic aspects of a community, 4) to identify and characterize stakeholders of a project, and 5) to map a community. To note is that the first function-group (i.e., methods that foster self-awareness) are not information gathering methods per se, but rather they enable engineers to gather information and make decisions more accurately.

As reported in table 5.2, these methods are overall almost equally distributed among the three participation levels. Consultative are the most common with 13 methods out of 32. Then co-constructive and consultative have almost the same number of methods: 10 and 9 respectively. In the sub-sections below, I describe and contrast passive, consultative, and co-constructive methods within each function group.

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Table 5.2. Information Gathering Methods Passive Consultative Co-constructive

To foster self- awareness

Beginners’ mind Observe vs interpret Privilege walk Privilege by numbers

0 0

Multipurpose Secondary research Diagram Create framework Find Themes

Interviews Focus groups Questionnaires Comparing and sorting objects Observations Message board

Theater Photovoice

To understand socio-cultural, political, and economic context

0 Daily Activities Historyline Wealth Ranking Calendars Self-Documentation

To identify and characterize stakeholders

Arena model

Social analysis CLIP V.I.P Value Sensitive Investigation Gender roles/task analysis

Role dynamics Social domain Social network mapping

To map the community 0 Transect walk Participatory mapping

5.2.2.1 Methods to foster self-awareness The four self-awareness tools came from two sources: the IDEO toolkit (IDEO, 2014) and the engineering and social justice framework of Leydens and Lucena (2014). The IDEO “Beginner’s mind” and “Observe vs Interpret” methods are simple exercises that allow engineers to “develop an unbiased understanding of people’s behavior and motivations.” (IDEO, 2014). For instance, in the “Observe vs Interpret” exercise, engineers look at a photo and train themselves to distinguish an observation from an

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interpretation, where an observation is focused on a thick, factual description of what is represented in the photo, while an interpretation seeks to give meaning to the photo that may or may not be accurate. While IDEO’s methods focused on designers’ preunderstandings and biases, Leydens and Lucena (2014) propose exercises with a related, but slightly different goal from IDEO, namely, to foster awareness of engineers’ “own privilege and their relationships to existing power structures” (p. 13). They propose two similar exercises: 1) the “Privilege Walk” that promotes awareness of race and gender privilege, and 2) “Privilege by the Numbers”, which focuses on privileges related to cisgender, gender, nationality, religion, class, race, ability, and sexuality. The enhanced self-awareness gained through these exercises can in turn “render more visible the perspectives of those who are in positions of power (dis)advantage” (p. 114), which is the same goal of the two IDEO methods described earlier. Therefore, these four methods would enable engineers to use the other methods described in the following sections in a more effective and appropriate way. 5.2.2.2 Multipurpose Methods The second subset of methods for understanding people and context comprises flexible methods that can be adapted to learn about a variety of aspects regarding the people of a community and the context of a project. The four passive and the six consultative methods can be divided in data collection and data analysis methods and are the typical social science research methods. There was only own passive data collection methods; secondary research (Beebe, 2001; IDEO, 2014), which enables engineers to learn about a variety of topics related to the project though secondary sources of data (publications,

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websites, and so on). All the six consultative methods enable the collection of a variety of information from community members and include semi-structured interviews (Almedom et al., 1997; Beebe, 2001; Freudenberger, 2008; IDEO, 2014; PeaceCorps, 2005), focus groups (Beebe, 2001; IDEO, 2014), questionnaires and surveys (Beebe, 2011), participant observations (Almedom et al., 1997; Beebe, 2001; IDEO, 2014), and object sorting exercises (Beebe, 2001). To note that IDEO (2014) also include context-specific interview strategy for gathering information on farming and health issues. These context- specific interview strategies were lumped together under “semi-structured interview,” but they are worth highlighting to exemplify the adaptability of the aforementioned consultative methods. The multipurpose methods mentioned so far enable the collection a variety of data, which then needs to be analyzed by the engineers. Both Beebe (2001) and IDEO (2014) suggest using qualitative coding and thematic analysis strategies. IDEO (2014) also adds two other methods “Create Frameworks” and “Diagrams,” which, as their names suggest, provide instructions to create frameworks and diagrams based on the analysis of the collected data. The last two multipurpose methods are co-constructive methods: photovoice (Aslam et al., 2013; Wang and Burris, 1997) and interactive theater (Ones, 2013). Photovoice is a technique in which community members take pictures of various aspects of their community and then construct and present a story about their community. This way the community members are enabled and empowered to represent their community through their own eyes. Ones (2013) instead used a modified version of August Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to give voice to women regarding their cooking habits and

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preferences. The community members organize an interactive skit in which foreigners also participate. This method can easily be adapted to investigate any issue in a community and to give voice to groups that usually do not hold decision-making power. 5.2.2.3 Methods to Understand Socio-Cultural, Political, and Economic Context This third sub-set of methods enable gathering insights on socio-cultural, political, and economical aspects of a community and comprises one consultative method and five co- constructive methods. The consultative methods is Peace Corps’ (2005) that instructs volunteers to asks community members about their daily activity in order to create a timeline of community members’ typical day and labor demand. A similar method is IDEO’s (2014) co-construcitve “Self-Documentation” approach, in which community members record their daily activities in a journal and then present this information to the designers. Historyline (Almedom et al., 1997; Freudenberger, 2008) is a co-constructive method in which community elders co-construct a timeline of the major historical events of the community using their own local way to describe time. Calendar (Almedom et al., 1997; Freudenberger, 2008; PeaceCorps, 2005) is another co-constructive method in which community members co-develop a calendar that describes seasonal variation and traditions of the community. Lastly, with “Wealth Ranking” (Freudenberger, 2008) community members use beans, sticks, or small rocks to rank the wealth of individuals and groups of the community. 5.2.2.4 Methods to Identify and Characterize Stakeholders This fourth set of methods is comprised of one passive, four consultative, and four co- constructive methods that enable to identify stakeholders and characterize their connections and relationships. Bowen and Acciaioli (2005) propose to use the “Arena

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Model,” a passive method that leverages social network theory to construct a model that visualizes all the relationships among stakeholders involved in a project. With Chevalier and Buckles’(2008) Social Analysis Clip, engineers can consult community members in order to create stakeholders profiles based on four factors: “(i) power, (ii) interests, (iii) legitimacy, and (iv) existing relations of collaboration and conflict” (p. 178). Similarly, with the “V.I.P.” (Values, Interests, Positions) method (Chevalier and Buckles, 2008) and the Value-Sensitive Empirical Investigation (Frideman et al 2006), engineers interview stakeholders in order to map and compare stakeholders’ position on values and interests related to a project. The “Stakeholder Identification” method (Chevalier and Buckles, 2008) enables engineers to map stakeholders in a rainbow diagram based on the degree to which stakeholders influence and can be affected by the outcomes of a project.

In contrast with the previous consultative methods, in the “Social Network Mapping” exercise (Freudenberger, 2008; PeaceCorps, 2005) community members draw a Venn diagram that maps the relationships among various individuals, households, and organizations of the community. In Chevalier and Buckles’(2008) Role Dynamics, stakeholders assess what they expect of each other and how to satisfy the requirements associated with their roles. Lastly, “Social Domain” is a co-constructive exercise that enables community members to construct a matrix of the relationship among each stakeholder. The columns of the matrix are stakeholders, while each row are characteristics that community members consider important in order to characterize each stakeholder.

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5.2.2.5 Methods to Map Community While the previous sub-set comprised methods to develop social maps, this fifth and last sub-set includes one consultative, and one co-constructive method to map physical aspects of a community. In Transect Walks (Freudenberger, 2008) and Systematic Walkabout (Almedom et al., 1997), engineers take a walk with community members and, as they consult them, sketch locations of important landmarks of the community. By contrast, in Participatory Mapping (Almedom et al., 1997; Beebe, 2001; Freudenberger, 2008; PeaceCorps, 2005), community members with the facilitation of engineers draw a map of their own community. This map can be drawn on the ground and rocks and sticks could be used to indicate different landmarks, or on flipcharts with marker pens.

5.2.3 Solution Development Methods This third and last group of methods comprises 15 (23%) of the 64 methods that can enable engineers to develop solutions. These methods serve two specific functions: 1) ideate and prototype solutions, and 2) evaluate and select possible solutions. As reported in Table 5.3, passive methods are more common with 10 out of 15 total, while consultative and co-constructive are more rare, with 3 and 2 out of 15 respectively. In the sub-sections below, I describe, compare, and contrast passive, consultative, and co- constructive methods within each of the four function groups.

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Table 5.3. Solution Development Methods Passive Consultative Co-constructive

To Ideate and Prototype a Solution

Role-play Storyboard Brainstorm Models Capabilities quick sheet Expert interviews

Build on the idea Participatory co-design

To Select and Evaluate a Solution

Multicriteria analysis Sustainability matrix Value sensitive technical investigation

Structured decision- making SWOT-AHP

Intervention ranking matrix

5.2.3.1 Methods to Ideate and Prototype a Solution The first sub-set of methods contains six passive, one consultative, and one co- constructive methods that enable engineers to brainstorm and prototype solutions to an identified problem or to meet a specific objective. It is important to note that all of the six methods belonging to this group come from IDEO’s (2014) toolkit, which is therefore the only source that proposed structured ways to ideate and prototype solutions. The six passive and the one consultative methods are all meant to be used sequentially. The first method, Brainstorming, is a passive exercise that allows designers to develop possible solutions to an identified problem. The passive methods “Capability Quick Sheet” and “Expert Interview” provide structured ways to identify needed capabilities to develop and implement a solution and to gain technical advice on the solution to be developed. Similarly, the “Role-Play” and “Story Boards” methods allow designers to “imagine the complete story of a user’s experience [with a solution] through a series of images or sketches.” The “Models” method is a passive technique that provides instructions on how

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to quickly develop a cheap and simple prototype. This method is naturally followed by the “Build on the Idea” method (consultative), which requires designers to share the prototype with the community members and gain their input. “Participatory Co-Design” is a co-constructive technique that includes all the above activities. However, in contrast with the five aforementioned methods, the community members or direct users attend a workshop, during which designers and community members brainstorm together to generate possible solutions and co-develop prototypes. Thus, the community members co-produce ideas and artifacts with the facilitation of the designers. 5.2.3.2 Methods to Evaluate and Select Solutions This last sub-set of methods includes three passive, two consultative, and one co- constructive method that enable engineers to evaluate, compare, and thus select proposed solutions. The three passive methods belonging to this group help engineers evaluate possible solutions based on pre-defined criteria. The Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA, Garfi and Ferrer-Mati, 2011) approach evaluates and compares solution based on a set of several criteria that are grouped in four main factors: technical, social, economic, and environmental. Friedman et al. (2006) proposes a system to evaluate and select technologies based on local values, which were identified through a value-based investigation (see section 5.3.3). Leydens and Lucena (2014) developed the Human Capabilities Matrix, which can be used to evaluate and compare designs based on their potential to enhance Nussabuam’s 10 human capabilities: “1) life, 2) bodily health, 3) bodily integrity, 4) senses, imagination, and though, 5) emotions, 6) practical reason, 7)

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affiliation, 8) other specifies, 9) play, and 10) control over one’s political and material environment” (Leydens & Lucena, 2014, p. 17). The two consultative method requires engineers to consult stakeholders in order to get information that the will be used to evaluate solutions based on pre-defined criteria. Specifically, Okello (2014) proposes the use of the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) – Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), while Avrai and Post (2012) propose a risk-based structured decision making system specifically for Point-of-Use water treatment systems that could be also expended to evaluate other applications. Finally, the only co-constructive method is the Intervention Ranking Matrix. The biggest difference with all the previous methods is that the evaluation criteria are not pre- defined, but rather, they are co-developed by community members during a workshop facilitated by the engineers. Thus, each time this method is used, the criteria will change based on the agreement of the community members participating in the workshop.

5.3 Chapter Summary In this chapter, I presented a use-inspired framework to classify methods based on two dimensions: the level of community participation and the function of the methods. The two dimensions allow engineers to choose methods based on what they need to accomplish and to what extent they want to involve community members. The level of community participation does not go from worse to best, but they rather provide a range of possibility. In any given project, engineers could use a combination of passive, consultative, and co-constructive methods. For instance, in one project, engineers could use secondary research, interviews, and participatory mapping. And while this analysis does not readily enable determination of which methods would and would not go best

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together, it might not be practical and effective to use multiple methods within the same cell (i.e., with same function and participation level). For instance, if an engineer needs to identify all of the stakeholders in a co-constructive way, he/she may choose between Social Network Mapping (Freudenberger, 2008) or Role Dynamics (Chevalier & Buckles, 2008), which are both co-constructive and have very similar purposes. In terms of project phase, the proposed framework spans almost all the possible project phase. Thus, engineers are able to choose a method based on one or more specific purposes that they are trying to achieve. For instance, if in the middle of a project they need to gain more information about some stakeholder group, they can consult the methods in section 5.2.2.4 and choose the one that best fit their needs. It is worth noting that I found a limited number of methods focusing on solution development. In fact, the methods to ideate and prototype as solution (section 5.2.3.1) come all from IDEO and refer to very early stages of conceptualizing solutions. The more advanced stages of developing and implementing the solutions are missing from this framework and will require more research in the future. Another way to think about choosing the methods is to select methods based on the engineers’ philosophy related to HE. For instance, in chapter 4, I reported that some papers discussed that understanding the structural and historical condition that led to specific community needs is a very important aspect of the project cycle (section 4.1.3). The methods to understand a problem of section 5.2.1.1 can provide many options to meet this criterion. Timeline (Chevalier and Buckles, 2008) provides a way to identify the historical roots of a problem and how it evolved overtime, while problem tree (Chevalier and Buckles, 2008) provides an effective way to recognize first and second

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order causes of a problem. On the other hand, some engineers might be more interested in taking a more empathic approach, which would requires considerable perspective-taking on the part of engineers. One of the methods that could help engineers to achieve this goal is Ones’ (2013) adaptation of August Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. In this method, engineers would participate in an interactive skit organized by community members, which would enable engineers to experience a simulated version of the lived issues that community members decided to represent. In sum, the framework offers a flexible map of methods that engineers can choose based on their philosophy or needs.

Finally, I assigned one level of participation and one specific function based on how they were described in the literature. However, this does not mean that the methods could not be used in different ways. Many of the passive methods could be used in consultative or co-constructive methods and vice-versa. For instance, the exemplar passive method secondary research could be used in a co-constructive way if community members are the ones doing the research. After the community members searched for information about their own community, they could debrief with the external facilitator and discuss the extent to which the information that was retrieved properly represents the community. Based on the results, the community members could reconstruct the information to their liking.

By contrast, co-constructive methods could also be used as passive methods. For instance, Chevalier and Buckles (2008) describe problem tree as co-constructive method, but it is easy to imagine how it could be as a passive method if engineers develop their own problem tree based on secondary research. Additionally, while some methods have very specific functions (e.g., mapping, identifying stakeholders, planning), some methods

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are more flexible and could be used during multiple phases of a project. For instance, interviews, focus groups, and observations can be used at any time in a project. Therefore, the framework should be understood as an initial guideline and resource, and it is up to engineers to decide how to use the methods. In the next chapter, I report on potential benefits and challenges of using specific groups of methods reported in this chapter. The set of potential benefits and challenges was obtained by interviewing practitioners. Understanding benefits and challenges can be every useful to help engineers decide which methods to use, when to use them, and what to take into account when using them.

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CHAPTER 6. BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF USING PARTICIPATORY METHODS

In chapter 4 and 5 I reported on the results of analyzing what has been published in the literature related to involving community partners in humanitarian engineering projects. In this chapter, I report on the insights that fourteen practitioners (faculty and professionals with multi-disciplinary backgrounds) shared regarding the use of a sample of the methods I reported in chapter 5. As explained in chapter 3, during the interview, I shared 21 methods (about a third of the methods I collected during phase 1b) with the participants, and I asked them to comment on these methods, including to state whether they used or were familiar with the methods and possible positive and negatives aspects of using these methods. The 21 methods were chosen to represent all the possible functions and participation levels of the framework reported in chapter 5. The goal of sharing this smaller set of methods was to elicit transferable insights that will be presented in this chapter.

Specifically, for the data analysis, I developed a codebook that comprised five broader codes. I coded as “Used,” any instances where the participants explicitly stated that they had used a method before. I coded as “Familiar” when the participants stated they were familiar or know the method but had not used or did not explicitly stated they

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had used it before. I coded as “Similar” when participants affirmed they used a similar method, but not exactly the one they were commenting on. To keep track of their evaluations of the methods, I coded as “Positive” all positive views about a method and as “Negative” all the negative opinions. The “Positive” code was further divided into two child codes. Namely, I coded a segment as “Interesting” when participants simply stated their potential interest in using a method, or as “Benefits” when participants pointed to specific advantages of using a method. The “Negative” code was also divided into four child codes. Specifically, I created four child codes for four different challenges: practical, communication, cultural, and ethical. Table 6.1 reports example quotes for each of the aforementioned codes.

Table 6.1. Codes and Short Examples for Each Code Codes Example quotes Used “I engaged in semi-structured interviews” [Anne Dare] Familiar “I know force field; we don't use it.” [Mark Henderson] Similar “Option domain, we've used something similar to that.” [David Munoz] Positives Interesting “Rainbow diagram, that’s interesting.” [Marissa Jablonski]

Benefits “In terms of community buy-in, there was one other technique that I find is really useful, which is, to get a community meeting together and have people draw a map.” [David Frossard]

Negatives Practical challenges “there are some practical limitations when you get in the field that I think inhibit a lot of them” [Anne Dare] Communicational challenges

“If you say the wrong word in a first sentence you can actually send that conversation off to the direction no one intended.” [George]

Cultural challenges “I think, talking about money is not the social norm.” [Ken Kastman] Ethical Challenges “We certainly have strong child protection policies, photo policies” [Michael]

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In the sections below, I elaborate on the details regarding the five codes reported in table 6.1, including by sharing relevant quotes from the interviews with participants. In section 6.1, I provide an overview of the participants’ familiarity with the methods, which is based on examining the “Used”, “Familiar”, and “Similar” codes. Then, in sections 6.2 and 6.3, I elaborate on some positive aspects and negative aspects of using these methods, which was based on the analysis of the “Positive” and “Negative” codes.

6.1 Participants’ Familiarity With the Methods In table 6.2, I present a summary reporting the prevalence of the “Used,” “Familiar,” and “Similar” codes for each method. Specifically, in table 6.2 there are 21 rows, one for each method I shared with the interviewees, and five columns for the four codes “Used,” “Familiar,” “Similar,” “Positives,” and “Negatives” (I will discuss the “Positives” and “Negatives” codes in the sections 6.2 and 6.3 respectively). The cells for the codes report the number of participants associated with each code. For instance, one participant stated that he/she used the method “photovoice,” one participant stated that s/he was familiar with the method, but did not really used it, and five participants used something similar to photovoice. The row labeled “Overall” reports how many participants’ transcripts included “Used,” “Familiar,” “Similar,” “Positives,” and “Negatives” codes.

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Table 6.1. Number of Transcripts Coded Under the Five Codes for Each Method Used Familiar Similar Positives Negatives Problem Tree 1 0 2 0 1 Force Field 1 1 1 1 1 Timeline 0 1 4 0 0 Photovoice 1 1 5 1 4 Framework 0 1 2 0 1 Matrices 0 1 2 1 1 Calendar 1 1 3 1 0 Daily Activities 1 1 3 0 0 Wealth Ranking 0 0 1 0 3 Participatory mapping 5 0 0 4 0 Rainbow diagram 0 1 3 1 0 Venn Diagram 0 0 2 1 0 Value-Sensitive Investigation 0 0 1 2 0 Self-Documentation 1 0 0 0 2 Trees of Means and Ends 0 0 1 2 1 Priority Ranking 4 0 6 1 0 Brainstorm session 5 0 2 0 0 Option domain 0 1 5 0 1 Human-capabilities matrix 0 0 0 0 1 Community Action plan 1 0 2 0 0 Prototypes 6 0 0 1 0 Overall 13 4 14 7 7

Table 6.2 provides some insights to understand the extent to which the

participants were familiar with the 20 methods. All 14 participants used methods similar to least one method listed in the table, 13 participants had used at least one of the methods, and 4 participants were familiar with at least one method, but did not explicitly stated having used it. Thus, the cumulative numbers in the last row of Table 6.2 indicate

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that most participants either used one or more methods and/or used similar ones. For instance, when Anne Dare read the description of the “timeline” exercise, she commented that she had not used exactly that method, but rather she leveraged a similar concept in her own practice:

I would not say necessarily that a physical timeline was created but this concept of thinking about history, history of your particular project, or the history of the community more unrelated to the technical challenges itself.

Sometimes, the participant said they did not used a specific method, but used a very similar method, as exemplified in the following exchange between me (AM) and Mark Henderson (MH):

MH: Rainbow diagram: No. We use something similar, because rainbow diagram is about stakeholders, right? AM: Right. MH: We use something called a stakeholder matrix that may be similar. The most used frequently used methods were “prototyping” (which included also

sharing the prototypes with community members), “participatory mapping,” and “brainstorming sessions,” while priority ranking, brainstorming sessions, and photovoice were the most “Similar.” Only 10 (50%) methods were not used by any participant. However, even if these 10 methods were not used, at least one participant was familiar with methods similar to those. For instance, none of the participants used the method “Rainbow diagram,” but three used something very similar to it, as showed in the previous quotes from Mark Henderson’s interview, and one was familiar with it, but had not used it. This suggested that I had collected enough information to comment on almost

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all the methods and to develop transferable insights. The only method that none of my participants was familiar with was “The Human Capabilities Matrix.” This, however, is not surprising and does not limit the insights of this study, because this method was published for the first time in late 2014 (Leydens and Lucena, 2014) and the interviews occurred in the fall of 2015. In general, when the participants stated they used a method, it was because they had learned about the method before actually using it, as one normally would expect. However, in one particular occasion, Marissa Jablonski found herself using “participatory mapping” without having planned to use it, or without specifically knowing she was using something like a pre-existing method. As she put it: “it kind of happened naturally.” It is worth further describing this situation because it provides a nice example of interactions between engineers and community members in the early stages of a project.

In a project in Guatemala, Marissa Jablonski and her team were working on a water distribution system to connect the houses of a small community to a water spring in the mountains. In one of their first site visits, they were planning to walk through the village with some members of the local water committee to decide the walkways for the pipes of a water system. However, not knowing where to begin she asked the water committee members to draw a map for the community on a piece of paper. The committee members became quickly engaged with the task:

So I said, What if you guys drew your village? So we took time and they drew it. And everybody kind of swarmed around the guy with the notebook and the pencil and they gave their input and then… then scratched that first one. They were like “no, no, no! We made a mistake!

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Give us a new sheet of paper!” and so they changed the pages and started again and they… so then, it became a question of… “does it make sense in your mind? There are obvious walkways. So does it make sense to follow this walkways and put the pipe there?” And they said “yeah. That makes the most sense because it would be easier, because we would not have to go through so many peoples’ land.” So that’s how that happened. [Marissa Jablonski]

Noticing how effective that exercise was, Marissa Jablonski decided to also use this technique in her other projects. Furthermore, it also worth looking at the extent to which each participant talked about the methods I shared with them. One thing that stood out from a general look at the interview transcripts is that David Frossard and Gary Burniske were the ones that seemed more familiar with or had used most of the methods. The reason for this could be associated to their different background as compared to all the other participants. In fact, they were the only two to have an educational background in social science and had worked for major international development organizations in their past. For instance, both David and Gary were the only two interviewees who had Peace Corps experience, which may help explain his greater familiarity with the methods, as some of the methods were taken from a Peace Corps field manual. This is not surprising, especially because of something that Robin Semer (RS) also discussed. In one of her projects, she used a highly participatory method, which requires participants to collaborate draw their vision for a sanitation system (or something else). She shared that this specific method was suggested by a colleague of hers, who happened to have had a Peace Corps experience:

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AM: How did you come up with that idea? RS: One of the engineers who works with us had been in the Peace Corps, and he talked with some of his Peace Corps buddies and some of the ones who were more educationally-oriented, who suggested that as an exercise to start the process. [Robin Semer]

This aligns with one specific finding that is discussed in the Chapter 4, 7, and 8, that is, community participation is better facilitated when a multidisciplinary team with diverse backgrounds is involved in a project.

Finally, it is important to point out that even though the participants did not use all of the methods listed in Table 6.2, this does not imply that the participants of this study did not interact extensively with the community members. Many participants in fact used more traditional methods like interviews and focus groups. Most of the participants also interacted with community members trough official community meetings, while others intentionally participated in social events to build relationship with their partners (as discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 7).

6.2 Positive Aspects The goal of sharing the methods listed in Tables 6.2 and 6.3 was to gather insights that could inform which types of methods might be most useful and what aspects need to be taken into account when using different types of methods. As reported in table 6.2, 7 participants expressed positive comments for at least one method, and participatory mapping was the method that was praised the most. In this section, I report on the positive comments that the participants expressed while they reviewed the list of methods reported in tables 6.2.

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To begin, the breadth and length of the participants’ responses varies notably. The participants that were not very familiar with some of the methods oftentimes simply stated their interest in using the method and the related potential benefits. For example, as Emily Wigley stated:

Force field, the force field one is interesting – I don’t believe we’ve used it. I think this would be a good tool because it seems like they are trying to use it for identifying the impact level of things. [Emily Wigley]

Others, who were more familiar with the methods, provided many different insights that will be presented in the following pages. In reviewing the methods, David Frossard shared positive comments related to two methods he was very familiar with: 1) mental maps (a method very similar to Freundenberger’s (2008) Venn Diagram and Peace Corps’ (2005) Social Network Mapping), 2) calendars (Almedom et al., 1997; Freudenberger, 2008; PeaceCorps, 2005), and priority ranking (PeaceCorps, 2005). In mental maps (also known as Social Network Mapping or Venn Diagrams) a group of community members creates a representation of the stakeholders of the community and their relationships. With calendar, community members draw a calendar of their typical year and represent seasonal variations in weather and commitments (e.g., agriculture cycles). In priority ranking, community members create a list of problem they would like to address and then they rank them based on their perceived sense of urgency.

Regarding mental maps, David Frossard suggests that it fosters community buy-in and it allows to identify what the community members perceives as the resources and strengths of their own community:

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Eventually, you get a mental map of the things that they think are the real resources to them, and the things that they feel or think are distant, unaccountable, not very useful kinds of resources. This kind of mental map is really sort of this weird psychological test about what the village thinks about all the resources that are around them. [David Frossard]

Calendars instead are very useful to understand when it would be appropriate to undertake project activity, as in some period of the year the community might not be available to engage in the project activities:

Knowing that there's a season where no one is going to working on “your” fish ponds because they're out in the field somewhere is extremely important to your project. Knowing when religious holidays can be crucial. We went to Nicaragua at Christmas, it turns out that December, people pretty much take December off. The people that worked with us were really giving up their vacation to work with us, and so they were super dedicated but I felt kind of bad. So after that, we started going after New Year’s instead of going at Christmas because then it's a little more acceptable time to get people to work. Volunteer on a project. [David Frossard]

This is not an uncommon challenge to resolve in these types of project. Gary Burniske also reported on a very similar situation where he and his team had to make sure all the project activities were accomplished before the summer when the local men usually migrated to another country to work:

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Then there's the other problem was that men migrated out, particularly during the summer months. They would go to Russia and work in the construction industry, so come April or so, May, often men would migrate to larger cities in Russia and would not return until harvest season. So we needed to also look at those social considerations because the potable water systems and constructing latrines took a lot of labor, so we needed to know that there would be sufficient labor to get the systems installed, because we were working within a window between, let's say, April and October. We had to have everything installed, because once the winter came, then it would snow and then the ground would freeze, and so you can't really undertake any construction activities during that period. [Gary Burniske]

Therefore, creating a calendar that describes seasonal variations and the major events of the community is a very beneficial exercise to do with the community. Many participants also identified as very useful methods like priority ranking and option domain because it allowed them to ensure that what they were working on was aligned with the desires of the community, or as David Frossard put it:

Priority ranking? Absolutely, because if you’re coming in there with a project and they rank that #7 on their list, you better rethink what you're doing there.

Thus, it becomes always very important to sit down with community members and do an exercise that allows everyone present to clearly identify the community’s priorities.

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Yet, the method that received the most praise was participatory mapping. The greatest benefit of this method is that it allows creating a stronger and more equal relationship between the foreign engineers or other professionals and local community members. Mark Henderson often uses this technique in open-air environment, where members of the community draw the map on the ground using leaves and colored papers:

we clear off a spot on the ground, a big spot, like dirt or maybe on concrete or on the street ... on the road. They use leaves and twigs and colored pieces of paper and things like that. They lay those out on the map where those things exist in the village. [Mark Henderson]

For Mark Henderson, the greatest benefit of doing this participatory mapping exercise is that “it helps establish more trust, because they understand we’re not there to dominate; we're there to learn, so maybe their defenses go down” [Mark Henderson]. In fact, he often observed that the community members may even start arguing over what to put in the map and where. This arguing is evidence that the community members are becoming more comfortable around Mark Henderson and his team and therefore trust is being built with the community members:

Some great experiences we've had is that when we're doing the maps and things like that, some of the community members will actually get in arguments themselves about where to put things on the map. That means that they're relaxing around us; that means that they're comfortable disagreeing with each other. [Mark Henderson]

When Marissa Jablonski did her participatory mapping exercise, she noticed similar dynamics among the members of the community that participated in this

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participatory activity (as shared in a quote a few pages above). She also noticed that the benefits of using this technique were twofold. On one hand, it helped the engineering students that were with her to realize that they did not know everything and that the community had very valuable knowledge and expertise:

It shows our group that they know, right? And our students they are like “oh! Of course they know!” Which really hits home that they live here. This is their place. Of course, they know. Who are we? We are the outsiders! [Marissa Jablonski]

On the other hand, it also showed that Marissa Jablonski and her students deeply cared about the community and that the houses belonged to real people and not some abstract and detached client:

And then it also, puts names to each house. So when we build… when we design the water system, we called them like “casa one”, “casa dos… two”, “casa three”. And when we see that, I don’t know, José Ramirez lives at casa one, in our map, we can write casa one – José Ramirez. So when we are building this system we say. This is José Ramirez’s house. And they say “you were paying attention! We are people!” Yeah we are all people. That kind of connection is there. [Marissa Jablonski]

Thus, in both Mark Henderson and Marissa Jablonski’s cases, the participatory mapping exercise helped build trusting relationships that became the basis for successful and sustainable projects in the long term (as I had suggested in Chapter 4 and will further explain in Chapter 7).

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Similar benefits and dynamics were reported by Robin Semer when she used a participatory drawing exercise to discuss sanitation options during a site visit in a village in Guatemala. Rather than asking the community members to draw a map of the community, this activity involves asking the community members to draw their vision for the future of the sanitation of their community:

“We want to know your dreams for the future,” and we pulled out some big paper and we gave them some markers, and we said, “Here. We'd like you to draw for us. You say you need some sanitation. Draw for us what your view is, you know, of what you have now and what you want for the future.” [Robin Semer]

As in the cases of participatory mapping described earlier, the community members were very engaged in doing this exercise:

They got really, really into this, like spent, oh, more than a half an hour drawing, and the people were commenting collectively amongst themselves, trying to say what they wanted, etcetera. [Robin Semer]

At the end of this exercise, the community members expressed their appreciation for how Robin Semer and her team treated them, explaining that they had never felt so respected by foreigners:

Then at the end of the meeting, they stood up one by one and told us that they had never worked with anybody like us, that they never felt so much respect and partnership with any group that they had ever worked with. [Robin Semer]

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This result was particularly important for Robin Semer and her team, because the community members were used to having donor-beneficiary types of relationship with foreigners, rather than the equal partnership that Robin Semer and her team were trying to establish:

They'd never heard this idea that they were the owners of the project and that we were not going to do anything without knowing that the project would meet their needs and be what they would want. [Robin Semer]

After this exercise, the relationship between Robin Semer and her community partner become stronger and stronger as they continued engaging in an equal partnership. To summarize the insights aforementioned, co-constructive methods like participatory mapping must meet two requirements to be really beneficial and effective; namely, they must provide valuable information on the socio-cultural context of the community, while at the same time positioning engineers as learners and community members as experts. This positioning, in turn, allows engineers and other professionals to recognize that community members possess valuable expertise to contribute to a project, while at the same shows that the engineers really value the insights and the contribution of the community members.

6.3 Negative Aspects While participatory methods can offer many benefits, including building trusting relationships, there are also many challenges that engineers need to take into account. In this section, I report on four main challenges and pitfalls related to using participatory methods as identified by my interviewees. The four challenges that emerged from the thematic analysis of participants’ “negative” insights are: 1) practical challenges, 2)

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communicational challenges, 3) cultural challenges, and 4) ethical challenges. Below, I describe each type of challenge, providing quotes from the interview transcripts to help illustrate each challenge.

6.3.1 Practical Challenges The participants in the study shared three general, practical impediments to using some of the methods listed in Tables 6.2 and 6.3. The first impediment is related to the availability of the resources needed to undertake some of these projects, including materials, facilities, favorable climate, and cost. After reading through the list of methods, for example, Anne Dare remembered that in one instance she had wanted to try using more participatory techniques which leveraged the use flipcharts, but she gave up due the limited resources available and the hostile climate:

I brought this up when I was in Colombia, wouldn’t it be great if we had a flip chart to record ideas or to like sketch out ideas as we have them? And it was like, you know, it is raining and we are driving around the countryside, what were we going to do with the flipchart in the meantime? […] I would not drive that thing around anyway and plus by the time that we got there it would be probably soaking wet.

Then, she concluded that if the conditions were right and the resources available, she would have loved to engage with some of these methods, although most of the time, it is better to rely on one’s own ability to facilitate discussion even without a flipchart or other engaging materials:

I think if the facilities were right and the participants were curious, open, and willing enough, I would definitely love to engage. But like I said… if

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it is the rainy season and you are driving around in a van, and you have limited things you can carry with you and you show up in the facility you were planning on working with your participants and does not have electricity or a table or anything. You will become quite limited in the kinds of things that you can do. And so you kind have to rely back on your own ability to facilitate discussion and generate ideas without a lot of extra materials or capability to walk around pointing out things. A similar limitation was observed both by David Frossard and Emily Wigley,

especially for photo-voice or other methods utilizing cameras. David Frossard observes that in small, rural communities of many countries, people might not have access to camera and therefore would not be able to take pictures:

Yeah, I think that's a clever one but I that's probably a very recent kind of thing that would not be possible in a lot of places. Where we lived in Zambia there was no electricity, there was no phone service, there was not a paved road, there was no running water unless I put it in the bucket and ran with it. We got our water out of an open hole in the ground and we treated it, filtered it so it's not a place where any of this Photo-voice stuff would apply.

Emily Wigley adds that even if people have access to camera and/or cell phones, the cost of printing or transmitting the picture would be prohibitive:

I think in Central America we could do something like this. I would be concerned with the cost to the community for sharing photos. I’d want to look at using a repository like Dropbox so that the pictures are accessible

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to both EWB and the community. I would just be concerned with the data cost on the community. [Emily Wigley] While the first impediment was related to limitations associated with needed

materials, costs, and logistics related to undertaking the methods and share the information, the second impediment highlights the fact that community members have limited time to engage in more participatory methods. Michael recognizes that methods like IDEO’s self-documentation put lots of pressure on community members and therefore they might not be a great fit. Similarly, Kevin Passino points out that some of these methods require heavy participation on the part of the community, which is not usually possible:

I think it’s very hard to know which method is going to work. Here is what I’m thinking. Some of these methods require some pretty heavy participation. If you are not getting good participation from a community, you are only getting participation from three people or something. Methods can fall apart; I think it becomes pretty difficult. [Kevin Passino]

Moreover, if engineers and other professionals take too much time away from community members in order to engage with these methods, the community can become annoyed by it and refuse to participate, especially if all those interactions might not have produced any tangible outcome. For instance, during one field trip, Robert’s students wanted to go door-to-door to collect data, but some members of their local NGO advised against it:

Then we wanted to go back and do more service and the partners just like, “Don't do it. It's raising expectations. Nothing has happened. No one has

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electricity based on the survey so far.” He said it doesn't reflect good on our NGO to keep doing this. He said, "Don't do it."

Robert’s students were quite surprised by the reaction of their NGO partners, especially because before departing for that trip they were reminded of the importance of surveying the community. Yet, they accepted the feedback from their NGO partners and moved on to something more practical:

Our new group of students that weren't part of the original group of students, because the students turned over and so they are thinking, well, we are told in all of our classes, “We have to go find out what the community’s need are and we have to do the survey to find the community needs.” Sometimes there is a more practical stuff. You just got to step back and say, “Well, we know people in the community. We know our NGO.” Half the people that work for the NGO are from that community. The director grew up there, “Let's just ask them.” You don't get scientific “value” from doing that. In a practical manner that makes a lot more sense than doing another survey and getting another IRB approval. [Robert]

Therefore, when a relationship with a local partner had been established for a long time, the wiser thing to do might be not to engage extensively with more community members, especially if that engagement happened in previous fieldtrips. The third and last aspect that might limit the extent to which community members can participate in some of these methods is their educational background. David Frossard observes that a problem tree is something that is well suited for dealing with corporate

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clients, who are generally more educated, which is not always the case of community members:

Problem tree can work, especially if you have educated people in the village who have been to college and who might think in an engineering or scientific way, that can work. But it's often outside the experience of regular people. [David Frossard]

Similarly, he saw studies using “option domain” with more educated people, because it can get complicated. Likewise, IDEO’s self-documentation, which requires participants to write a journal, might be “hard where people can't read and write” [David Frossard]. In sum, many of the co-constructive methods reported in Chapter 5 require materials, unrealistic levels of community engagement, facilities, costs, and a level of education that may limit their use. Consequently, it is not surprising that the participatory mapping approach was the method that was most praised, as it can be easily adapted to various conditions and kept relatively inexpensively. In fact, it could be done on the ground with sticks, rocks, and leaves, or on paper in rural area, and on paper with markers in community centers or more urban areas.

6.3.2 Communication Challenges In addition to encountering practical challenges while using these methods, engineers need also to talk into account communication challenges. The participants expressed two types of challenges as related to communicating with community members. The first challenge centers on the actual choice of words that engineers use when communicating with partners while using these methods. The wrong use of words can derail the process

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and hinder proper participation on the part of community members. As George noted, for example:

The power of language itself, I’m not trying to be touchy feely but here’s the point and you know this as someone is trying to speak Italian. If you say the wrong word in a first sentence, you can actually send that conversation off to the direction no one intended. [George] Using the right language means also being able to ask questions in an open-ended

way that is also appropriate for the culture where the conversations are taking place. In preparing his students to interview community members, for instance, David Frossard pushes them to use more open-ended questions and to avoid questions that might be specific to the students’ culture, but might not be completely appropriate for the community where they are doing a project:

The problem I normally see is that ... Well, a couple problems. One is the questions students ask are very specific to our culture and very not attuned to other cultures unless they've been there and spent time. It's a very, kind of, ethnocentric set of questions. Beyond that, they tend to be very specific questions based on what engineers think about. I tended to say, ‘How about some more opened ended [ones]?’

Both Anne and Marissa also learned this lesson over time and through experience trying different approaches. Anne remembers that in her first projects she leveraged very structured surveys that allowed her to collect the same data across many subjects:

I guess the first time I did kind of a human subjects research project we stuck more to a survey. This was also in Palestine among the first times I

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visited. We really stuck to a survey because we wanted to collect very consistent information from house to house.

However, she soon noticed the pitfalls and limitations of this approach: We could not get through to the kind of meat of information you wanted to find out from someone because you were so constrained by asking the question that you had to ask so that you could have a very complete spreadsheet of answers from everyone you interviewed. So that’s why I started shy away from that. [Anne Dare]

Consequently, over time she moved to a less structured interview protocol, which allowed her greater flexibility to adapt her questions on the fly:

I use more a survey that I developed kind of a guide to remind me the next thing I want to ask about and to allow for some consistency, but then it allowed me some flexibility to stray away from that if someone brought up a topic that I really enjoyed or thought was really important. [Anne Dare]

Similarly, Marissa Jablonski recalls that in her earliest projects she used to go door to door to explain how to wash hands to community members, but now instead she goes to have more informal conversation and listen to their concerns:

We used to hold these flashcards and say you should wash your hands, you should not play with pigs, and you, you, you… And now, we are like, you are going to live as you live, but what are your questions? What do you think about water?

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Therefore, choosing the right words and allowing for some open-endedness may improve communication between engineers and community members, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of using consultative and co-constructive methods.

And yet, word-choice is not the only communication-related challenge that the participant commented on. The second communication challenge is probably the most obvious as it refers to language differences between community members and engineers. In fact, Emily Wigley reports that she encountered the greatest communication challenges during an Engineering Without Borders project in a small village in Burkina Faso:

The project that I worked on in Burkina Faso was probably my most challenging for language translation because throughout the country most people don’t speak English, they speak French. In the area we were in, most didn’t speak French, they spoke at least one of several sub-dialects. [Emily Wigley]

To address this challenge, she worked with translators to translate the questionnaire in the local language and then back-translate it into English to make sure that the translations were accurate:

When we were doing all our pre-questionnaires to go through it for ourselves, thinking about what we would like to ask the community when we meet them, we had to translate it to French then have it translated into a sub-dialect. Then we would have somebody translate it back to us to see if we were actually getting the intent of the question across because it is easy for things to get lost in translation. [Emily Wigley]

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Communicating with the support of translators is in fact quite common and many participants shared that they always have present somebody that speaks the local language when interacting with community members. Yet, many things can be lost in translation especially when talking about technical aspects of a project, which can lead to confusion. Ken Kastman experienced that sort of confusion in the early stages of a water project in a small Mexican community:

When Dina, our community champion, first came and talked, she talked about a project for a “water press.” We couldn't figure out what that meant. Why do you want to press water? What's a water press? It turned out after talking to her, that in Spanish, the word "pressa" is "dam". She was actually asking us to design a dam to contain water, which is what she thought would be the solution to having enough water in the dry time of the year. I tell that part of the story because it highlights the difficulty of translation of technical terms, even for people that understand them. [Ken Kastman].

Furthermore, translators are often not very fluent in English themselves or may gloss over details that might instead be very valuable, as happened to Anne Dare while she was doing fieldwork in Palestine to investigate water re-use options. Although Anne Dare was not completely fluent in the local language, she was able to understand that the translator was not always completely trustworthy:

I started identifying times when I think he would gloss over things and telling me more what I wanted to hear just to move things along instead of telling me exactly what people were saying and letting me like you know

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quiz that a little further. He was like oh yeah this just what the other guy said, same thing. Actually, as far as I can understand it is not what he said. Sometimes I had to push a little bit. And be like “Are you sure that’s what they actually said?”

Consequently, it becomes very important to work with a translator that is committed to the project to make sure that the translation is accurate. Additionally, being able to talk a little bit of the local language can become very effective and can allow engineers and other professionals to earn the respect of the local community. As Anne Dare additionally explained:

I feel I was a lot more respected when I showed up and introduce myself and conducted part of the interview myself. People I think were really appreciative of that. And I think saw me a little bit more as a legitimate like researcher instead of someone that was just tagging along and may be wasn’t super committed to the project or whatever. The fact that I had taken the time to actually learning the phrases that I need to be able to conduct the interview fostered a lot of respect. [Anne Dare].

In sum, communication is a major part of HE projects. Poor choice of words, ethnocentric questions, inaccurate translations, and lack of commitment on the part of the translators can hinder interactions with community members, even when using very beneficial methods like participatory mapping. Moreover, learning some of the local language is always well received by community members and allows engineers and other professionals to earn a lot of respect.

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6.3.3 Cultural Challenges The way people communicate and interact is often influenced by their culture. Therefore, in addition to differences in the way people communicate, differences among cultures may prevent engineers to effectively and appropriately interact with community members. Regarding this challenge, Anne Dare shared a very interesting example. While in Palestine, she was not sure whether or not she should have shook the hand of the men she was talking to, as she perceived that it would not be culturally appropriate for a man and a woman who do not know each other to touch each other:

In Palestine and for long time I felt like I should not be shaking… I should not be giving my hand to shake to men that I met. I did not feel it was appropriate as a woman to be doing that. Because it is just not super common for a man and woman that don’t know each other to touch each other. [Anne Dare]

Yet, one day, under the suggestion of her collaborator, she decided to try to shake the hand of men, thinking this would show respect. However, in one occasion, she shook the hand of a man and then realized only afterwards the man had just washed his hands to get ready for prayer and Anne Dare’s gesture meant the man had to start over again:

My collaborator was like why don’t you offer your hand because they are waiting for you because you are the woman and you should be the one giving the hand. I was like this is really weird. I still feel uncomfortable with this. So you know, the next day we go out and we ran into this guy and I put out my hand and I “Oh hey I am Anne Dare, nice to meet you”. And he hesitantly shakes my hand and I find out later that he just washed

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for prayer and he should have not shook my hand because he was like ready to go and he had to go rewash completely because I have done that.

Anne Dare felt bad about this cross-cultural incident and she realized that little cultural differences like this one can come in the way of getting good responses from community members, even when using very simple methods like interviews. Local cultural norms can also limit who can interact with whom. For instance, George reports that in some countries women may not be allowed to talk freely in front of men, or may not talk the same to a woman who has not yet had a child because the local women may not consider the foreign a woman a “real” woman. In fact, George explains that, while in Western countries the “status” of woman is given based on age, in other communities and cultures a woman is a woman only after bearing a child:

Women may be doing a lot of things that are suffering from a problem but they won’t say anything in their cultural context in front of the men. Get this they are not going to say anything openly generally to a young female student because in their eyes that young female student has not had a child and therefore, is not a woman therefore they can’t talk to her as a woman. You see what I’m saying, the fact that you can be 40 years old as a graduate student never had a child and in their culture you’re still not a woman. [George]

While this example was specific to cultural limitations regarding gender interactions, it is easy to imagine how there might be cultural limitations based on other demographic aspects, including age and social status.

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In addition to cultural differences involved with interpersonal interactions, some methods could focus on topics that may not be culturally appropriate to discuss openly. For instance, many participants characterized the method of “wealth ranking” as potentially culturally inappropriate. Because of this, Ken Kastman advised against including this method in a toolkit:

I would not suggest that you include "wealth ranking" in your toolkit. I don't think you'll get an accurate answer. People do not talk about wealth, and obviously they know who has money. I think, talking about money is not the social norm. If we said, "How much did you sell your corn for?" ...we would get an answer, but other than that, wealth ranking is just not something that we got into. [Ken Kastman]

David Frossard expressed a similar opinion regarding “wealth ranking,” adding that it could even be counterproductive in terms of building strong relationships:

Wealth ranking, I've only done that as a social scientist and it's really touchy, in a lot of places. Because when you make the wealth differences apparent, it sort of implies that things are a bit unfair. And the people on the top get uncomfortable, the people at the bottom sort of like it, but it doesn't really build camaraderie. [David Frossard]

It some countries, it can even be dangerous to use this method or to talk about wealth openly: “doing this, people can get killed. You'd be ill-advised to make this too apparent. Talking in terms of improving the life of everyone is okay, that's general enough.” Therefore, David Frossard strongly suggests fully understanding the culture, history, and

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politics of the country or locale before using “wealth ranking” or any other method that is focused on a topic that could be culturally inappropriate to discuss. In sum, local cultural and social norms may limit both who can interact with whom and what topics can be discussed openly. This creates many challenges in using any method, even the simplest like interviews. Consequently, engineers need to understand the local culture, properly adapt to local norms before undertaking any form of interaction with the local community members, and rely on trusted informants and intermediaries within or outside the community.

6.3.4 Ethical Challenges As noted in the preceding sections, practical, communication, and cultural challenges were the most common themes identified by the participants. However, two participants also pointed out some ethical challenges with methods like photo voice that require taking pictures. For instance, George points out that the main problem with taking picture relates to how the pictures are used, who owns the pictures, and whether or not informed consent was obtained. For instance, George speaks against using pictures for fundraising especially if engineers did not received consent from community members:

I’ve rung people who’ve taken pictures or had the locals take pictures and once they got home they go gosh this would make a great fundraising picture. I actually had to stop them, one of my groups at my university wanted to make a coffee table book of all these nasty pictures to raise money. I said wait a minute when these pictures were being taken, before they were taken did you guys explicitly state this and have signed releases or evidence of global consent? [George]

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To address this issue, Michael’s Humanitarian Engineering NGO has developed “strong child protection policies, and photopolicies.” These policies are based on a principle of reciprocity for which if something would not be allowed in the home country (e.g., “taking photos of strangers’ kids” [Michael]), it should not be allowed in the country where the HE project is being undertaken. While the considerations shared by George and Michael were specific to taking pictures, the same considerations may also apply when gathering or sharing any sort of data. Therefore, engineers are strongly advised to gather informed consent forms or at least be as transparent as possible regarding how information being gathered will be used.

6.4 Chapter Summary In this chapter, I reported the results of analyzing the comments that participants shared with me when prompted to review a sample of 20 methods. In general, the participants did not use most of the methods, but were familiar with many of them, and/or had used similar methods. This familiarity and field experience with similar methods allowed them to provide many useful insights that while most of the time where specific to the methods, they may inform any interaction that engineers have with community members. One of the most beneficial aspects of using these methods is that it helps position engineers as learners rather than experts. According to George, for example, the most important thing when using these methods is that engineers need to be “educated or taught or informed by the community.” Creating this engineers-as-learner situation shows respect for and appreciation of local knowledge and it helps instill strong and long-lasting relationships, which are considered the spine of success in sustainable HE projects, as reported in more detail in the next chapter.

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However, a number of factors limit the productive use of these methods. First, there are many practical limitations in using these methods. The engineers may need materials that are not readily available or could incur costs to the community. Further, the community members may not have the time or might not be willing to participate in these methods. Moreover, cultural and communication differences may limit the extent to which engineers and community members can interact, or could create confusion. Additionally, engineers need to take into deep consideration ethical issues related to collecting and sharing information related to the community and are strongly advised to ask for informed consent and IRB approval. Finally, many of these methods requires various degrees of expertise and awareness, therefore training interventions before actually going in the fields could maximize the benefits from using these methods. A few of the themes that I reported in this chapter also align with and expand on many of the concept discussed in chapter 4. For instance, the practitioners provided many examples of techniques that can be used to build trusted relationships, which was listed as a major guiding principle in chapter 4 (4.1.4). Moreover, the practitioners confirmed the benefits of creating multidisciplinary teams (4.1.5), because non-engineers may be more familiar with methods reported in chapter 5 and may have a different set of skills that could support the effective use of these methods. Many of the challenges reported in this chapter additionally suggest that engineers need to develop many of the competencies reported in chapter 4 (4.3). For instance, communication-related challenges in using the methods imply that engineers need to develop strong contextual listening and communication skills in order to use the methods appropriately (4.3.3). Cultural

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challenges also require that engineers develop an ability to navigate and adapt to cross- cultural differences (4.3.2). In sum, the participants shared many interesting and transferable insights regarding the use of the methods I presented to them. More generally, all the methods presented in Chapter 5 may have the potential to provide many advantages to support the long-term sustainability of a project, as long as all the aforementioned challenges are taken into consideration. Creating a multidisciplinary and diverse team may also facilitate using the methods and addressing all related challenges. In the next chapter, I report on some other themes that emerged from the analysis of the interviews and that provide other insights related to different aspects that could facilitated community participation in humanitarian engineering and similar projects.

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CHAPTER 7. THE SOCIOTECHNICAL NATURE OF HUMANITARIAN ENGINEERING

In this chapter, I report the results of the thematic analysis on the first part of the interviews, which focused more broadly on the interviewees’ approach to HE projects, as well as their struggles and successes. The analysis led to the development of three broader themes that are described in sections 7.1-7.3 of this chapter and in Table 7.1.

The first major theme focused on the participants’ conceptions of the nature of HE practice. They in fact shared statements and observations that elucidated the core aspects that constitute the practice of HE (see section 7.1). The other themes are two major and related aspects of HE practice that emerged recurrently from the analysis and further demonstrate the sociotechnical nature of HE. The first of these two aspects relates to building trusting relationships with community members and project partners. Within this theme, participants talked about: 1) the importance and benefits of trust (section 7.2.1), 2) the importance of having a strong project partner (7.2.2), and 3) the importance of taking the time to engage in social interactions with community members and project partners (7.2.3). The second aspect instead focused on the idea of using an asset- or strength-based approach to HE (7.3), which is based on recognizing that communities possess extremely valuable knowledge and expertise (7.3.1). In the following sections, I provide more details and relevant quotes regarding these emergent themes.

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Table 7.1. Code and Associated Examples Codes Example quotes Definitions of Humanitarian Engineering

“Engineers Without Borders is 80% sitting there listening and maybe 20% actual engineering” [Emily Wigley]

Building Trusting Relationships

Importance of trust “Without trust you cannot build and without trust no one is listening” [Marissa Jablonski] Local partner “We follow the lead of our community partner for once.” [Robert] Social interactions “We arrange to be there, and we arrange to have a meal together.” [Mark Henderson] Asset-Based Approach “we look at what the community is doing well, rather than focus on the deficit and the negative” [Michael] Local knowledge

“There's a person who's very handy at Ak'Tenamit who is able to rig things up to make things work, and does do those kind of things sometimes to implement.” [Robin Semer]

7.1 The Nature of Humanitarian Engineering During the conversations with my participants, many of them shared definitions and insights that elucidate the nature of HE. At the beginning of our conversation, Ken Kastman shared with me his own definition of HE:

I would say humanitarian engineering is “the process of developing and implementing engineering solutions for basic human and community needs, primarily in developing countries, and is based on a functional life- cycle approach.”

He later explained that by “functional life-cycle” he meant “a rational, low-cost, low- maintenance, sustainable solution.” This definition aligns very well with the extant literature on HE that I reviewed in Chapter 2. While talking about his work in Mexico and Honduras, he shares observations that reveal that HE entails much more than

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traditional engineering work. Reflecting on his experiences, he noted that “engineering is the easy part” of what he does and that the cultural issues are the most difficult:

Cultural issues are really the hardest humanitarian engineering issues to solve. The engineering part is the easy part.

Aligning with this observation, he further adds. “the listening and communicating are the real key factors to making humanitarian engineering projects work well.” These types of observations were not uncommon among my participants.

Emily Wigley also recognizes the importance of listening and explains that listening is the larger part of what she does on the field:

I often say, Engineers Without Borders is 80% sitting there listening and maybe 20% actual engineering.

Likewise, David Frossard states that “the engineering is the easy part of this” and that “the problem is the cultural side of it.” Similarly, while talking about developing a gravity-fed water distribution system, Marissa Jablonski admits that the technical part is not “rocket science,” but that all “the other stuff” (i.e., the social aspects) are the ones that matter the most:

the engineering part, come on…, gravity… right, water will always flow down the hill. So a pipe, then you replace a pipe with a stronger pipe, like…, this is not rocket science. That’s not what we are learning. Yeah, that’s important, but it is not, it is all the other stuff that matters.

Along the same line, Emily Wigley recognizes that “long term relationships” are what makes things work best, a concept that is also stressed by Kevin Passino:

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the relationships are the hard things to build. In the end, the technology is just one little thing. The relationships you have to develop are crucial for the whole process, getting it started and then – the old saying is, “nothing gets done except on the back of relationships.” That’s true.

Building trusted relationships is in fact a very important component of these projects, because, without trust, cultural and communicational issues likely cannot be overcome.

The interview excerpts shared so far demonstrate that the practice of HE extends far beyond the technical and it integrates both the technical and the social. This introduces complexities that engineers cannot solve alone with the traditional engineering way of framing and solving problems. Therefore, in addition to use methods from different disciplines (like those reported in Chapter 5), it becomes very important to take an inter-disciplinary approach to HE. For instance, Mark Henderson explained that a key feature of their approach to HE is that it must be multi-disciplinary:

One feature of the methodology is that engineers can't do it all, because you need multi-disciplinary approach, typically, to problems. You need humanities people, you need business people usually, you need engineers, you need anthropologists.

Many interviewees also support the need for multi-disciplinary team. Gary Burniske, especially, points out that while it might be useful for engineers to gain expertise in addressing the social aspects of these projects, having people on the team who specialize in these aspects can be much more productive:

the social sides can be extremely complex and hard to understand, and so if you have people that specialize in that area, they can help provide the

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guidance. It's not that engineers can't learn it as they go along and if they're doing a number of community projects to acquire a lot of those skills, but particularly until they've had that opportunity, I think it's important for them to engage sociologists, in particular, are quite good. It could be public health specialists, depending upon the program. You could have anthropologists.

In sum, while developing low-cost, low-maintenance solutions is important, the real struggle is to build trusted relationships, which in turn allow for better communication and in the end ensure the sustainability of a project. Additionally, as explained later in this chapter, trusted relationships allow moving from a needs-based to an assets/strengths-based approach, which is much more empowering for the community and increase the chance that solutions will be sustainable.

7.2 Building Trusted Relationships As it emerged from the quotes reported in the previous section, building relationships is a core aspect of HE practice and therefore it is worth exploring further. In the next sections, I first report on the importance and benefits of building trust, as it was shared by the study participants. Then, I specifically focus on the importance of the relationship between engineers and local project partners. Finally, I report examples of social interactions that the interviewees described as helpful for building trust.

7.2.1 The Importance and Benefits of Building Trust with Community Partners The importance of building trusted relationships with project partners and community members emerged from the words of many of the interviewees. For example, Robin

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Semer observes that to ensure success it is important to go beyond the resource transaction and to make sure to establish trust with the community:

I think it's a good idea to have a relationship, and not have it be all just business and a monetary transaction. I think that trust is an important part of making a project like this successful.

Trust enables genuine collaboration that is sustained through meaningful communication and thus enables a project to be successful. A lack of trust would instead make it impossible to get anything accomplished:

Without trust you cannot build and without trust no one is listening. The trust goes between the three groups. And you can’t skip one of them. You cannot be the outsiders who are untrusted. [Marissa Jablonski]

Marissa Jablonski came to this conclusion by observing a project that led to a solution that was never used. She describes a project she witnessed in which the outsiders did not establish trust with the community and they built a bridge that the community did not want and still have not used.

Likewise, Emily Wigley observes that if engineers do not have the trust of their partners they will never get the necessary feedback to understand whether the project they are proposing makes sense for the community:

You need to have confidence that what you are proposing is acceptable. I don’t have a great way of assessing that other than having trust in the relationships. If you are not getting feedback then that’s probably a bad sign.

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Emily learned this lesson through experience. In fact, she recalls that when trying to install a water pump in a spring they had everybody on board, except a group of local woman who did not show much enthusiasm regarding the proposed solution. In fact, Emily and her teammates were not receiving good feedback from that group of women and could not understand what the issue was. Thus, they decided they did not want to continue with the project until they understood what was going on:

All the main groups seemed on board except for this women’s group. They wouldn’t really – we just weren’t getting a positive response from them. They seemed hesitant and they were like, “Yeah, okay.” The project team felt that they could not continue until they had a better understanding of what this women group’s concerns were.

It took Emily Wigley and her teammates about two years of visiting the community in order to establish the needed trust that allowed the women to finally open up and share their concerns:

They spent another, I want to say two years, going down there, once or twice a year, just to meet with this women’s group to try understand what their concerns were. It took that much time for them to eventually tell us their concerns.

When finally the women shared their concerns, Emily Wigley and her teammates found out that the group of women did not like the solution because it would take away one of their weekly social times, which was very important to them:

The women told us that they used this spring to wash their clothes. For this women’s group, the only social time that they really had every week is

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when they washed their clothes together, which their Moms had done, their Grandmas had done. They all used the spring.

Once they realized how important that social time was for this group of women, Emily and her teammates proposed to build a laundry area next to water pump, so that the women would still have that social time. The women liked that idea and Emily and her teammates ended up building a laundry area close to the water pump:

We asked them, “What if we built you a laundry area on the outside of the water tanks, could we build you just a specific laundry place where you can still gather, you can still do your laundry, so that you have somewhere to go but the pump doesn’t get damaged?” They were thrilled, we ended up doing that and it all worked out. That took two years and it was all just like relationship building.

Without having spent the time to build the relationship, Emily and her teammates would have not being able to install a sustainable solution, because the group of women would have not communicated openly with Emily and her teammates.

As is well illustrated in Emily Wigley’s story, one of the greatest benefits of having trusted relationships with community members is that it facilitates maintaining more open communication with them. When trust is established, the community feels more comfortable to express their needs and opinions and is enabled to influence deeply the project activities and decisions.

Another example related to Marissa Jablonski’s interactions with a community clearly shows the benefits of maintaining open communication with community members. In this particular situation, Marissa Jablonski and her students had developed the

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preliminary design of a gravity-fed water system for the village of Quejchip in Guatemala. The village was divided in two parts: the lower where the parents and elders lived and the higher where the younger families lived. The new water system would have supplied water independently to the higher part of the village, as the lower was already attached to another spring:

They had half of the water system already, in the lower part of their village, but their children were now adults and moving up the mountain from their parents. So, Quejchip purchased a spring above those new houses and then the idea was to have our chapter design a gravity-fed water system that piped the new spring just to the new homes, and the parents who lived below would still use the old spring.

Yet when Marissa Jablonski and her team presented this idea, the community did not receive the proposed idea with great enthusiasm. However, because Marissa Jablonski and her team had established a trusted relationship with the community, the community felt comfortable to share their concern. The community explained that they did not like the design because the new system would not allow diverting water to the lower part of the community in case the older spring dried:

They said “you have here saying that everybody up top gets the new water and everybody down below gets the old water”. And we said “yeah” and they said “but what if a spring dries up?” And we said “well then half the village gets water” and they said “oh that’s terrible! That’s our parents or our children. So, why don’t we connect them both so everybody shares one water?”

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Listening to the community concerns, Marissa Jablonski and her team redesigned the new system so that it would connect to the old system and distribute water in the other part of the village in case of emergency. Receiving the candid feedback from the community was possible only because they maintained opportunities for open discussion thanks to the strong relationship with their local partner. Finally, with trust, it is possible to build community’s buy-in or ownership, which should be the ultimate goal of any project. David F. observed that his goal is to “become obsolete,” because if the community does not own a solution, the community will always be dependent on foreigners to come and fix what they have left behind:

I've seen this everywhere. Outside development agencies come in. They will drill a borehole. They'll build a bridge. They'll build a schoolhouse. Then something goes wrong. The roof blows off in a typhoon, and [the community members] say, "Well, where are the Germans to come back and fix their school building? When are the people that drilled this borehole going to come back and fix their well?" The problem that everybody has with development is the problem of buy-in, and the problem of ownership. In sum, even if trust is not a typical object of interest for engineers, it was

often seen as one of the most fundamental factors for facilitating higher levels of community participation. Therefore, it becomes very important for engineers to create trust with strong project partners (7.2.2) and to foster trust through engaging in social interaction (section 7.2.3).

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7.2.2 Strong Project Partner For the participants, it is particularly important to build strong relationships with a local project partner, like local champions, local NGOs, and international organizations with a strong on-the-ground presence. For instance, when asked about success factors, Robert shared that having a strong project partner with whom you can have open and frank discussions is very important:

Attributes that I see are important that I've come to learn over the years is a good partner. Not just a partner that they want you to work with them but a partner that can tell you what’s not going well and we need to change this.

Marissa Jablonski as well recognized the importance of her project partner and the trusted relationship she has with him. She explained that her project partner is able to act as a broker between the community members and Marissa Jablonski and her team, because he is able to listen patiently to both sides. She concludes by recognizing that her project partner is so important that “if [he] dies the whole system falls.” Ken Kastman experienced first hand the difference between having and lacking a local champion. He observed that the main difference between a project in Honduras and another in Mexico was that in Mexico he worked with a local champion that was really committed to the project and the community. His champion would take care of many aspects of the project while Ken Kastman and his team could not be present:

The communication was a little bit more difficult in the Honduras project than the Mexican project. I think it's because we had such a strong local champion on the Mexican project. If we ran into some issues, then she

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would get on the phone to her relatives and talk it through, work out what was the issue, and what was the answer. We didn't have that same level of champion in Honduras.

Struggles to maintain a strong local partner can also occur when a community is somewhat unstable, as it is hard to maintain a relationship when people leave and do not come back. This is what Robin Semer and her team experienced when the people with whom they had built relationships had left the community:

because a number of the people that we had those relationships with are now gone, and we never had quite the exact same experience with some of the new people as we had with the old. We’re having to build new relationships over and over again and are not there enough to do it. There's enough of a kernel there that we still have, but not all the players are the same.

Finally, committed project partners ensure that there is always somebody locally who can test and monitor a solution and work as an intermediary. For instance, one of the greatest challenges for Mark Henderson was that he and his team cannot stay long enough in the community, as he believes that the positive impact on a community is a direct function of time and trust:

The amount of impact you have is a function of a lot of things, including how long you're in the community and how much trust you have with the community members.

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However, he shared that he was very excited and hopeful for a new partnership with a Peace Corps volunteer because he believes that the Peace Corp volunteer can be the project partner that he was missing in previous projects:

Now we're partnering with the Peace Corps, because Peace Corps volunteers are present in their community twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for twenty-seven months. They are passionate, they are committed to that community, they are fluent in English and the local language, and they understand both cultures ... our culture, and the culture of the community. It's a really a good way for us to be present virtually, sort of, in that community for a long period of time.

In sum, the local project partner can be very helpful because that person can work as an intermediary between foreigners and the community and can support the project and maintain the partnership when engineers leave.

7.2.3 Social Interactions While building trusted relationship is very important, it is not always simple and can take time. As discussed in chapter 6, there are few methods, like participatory mapping, that can help create better dynamics between outsiders and the local community. However, many interviewees agreed that it very important to take time to partake in social interactions with the community. Emily Wigley explains that she learned this through experience. At the beginning, she did not budget time for building relationships, but had to do it anyway because she recognized the importance of it:

When we started in Kenya and we made our itinerary for the trip – relationship building wasn’t something that we had budgeted time for. We

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did it anyway because it became readily apparent that it was important, but we didn’t budget the time that it was taking to meet and talk to people. It all worked out because as soon as we did that, then other things went a bit faster.

Since her project in Kenya, she made sure that she would always budget the time to build relationships even if she still feels like she is not really getting much done:

In subsequent projects we budgeted significantly more time to just sit and meet with people even if it feels like it’s doing nothing. I think that’s the biggest change. Especially the first day or two you are there, budgeting at least half a day if not the whole day, just going around, meeting people, sitting in peoples’ houses, having people talk to you, getting introduced to people. Budgeting that upfront so you can develop those relationships as well as have a more accurate estimation for the time you have to do engineering work or project assessment work.

Aligned with Emily Wigley’s thinking, Robert makes sure to spend 3 to 4 weeks in the community each time he goes to visit the community, which provide him with the flexibility to attend cultural events:

[Staying 3 to 4 weeks] gives us the leeway particularly on some Saturdays or Sundays to do some cultural events so we don’t have to work on the project. Usually we are there during the Independence Day celebration, so we'll go participate in the parades and the activities.

Other interviewees also shared that they attend different types of social events and make sure to spend time with the community in order to build relationship. For instance, during

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one project, David Frossard shared that he had students go to a wedding or a baseball game rather than surveying the area, because those social interactions would be much more valuable:

But yeah, the social aspect, like when we arrived in Nicaragua that day and they said it's either a wedding or baseball, I said, "Great, this is great. Let's absolutely go to the wedding, let's go to the baseball." That was, to me, a lot more important than going to the site and start surveying with our laser sights the future bridge site.

Attending social events can be very productive indeed. David Munoz explained that the first project he started in Honduras originated from a conversation that he initiated with the mayor of the city during a 50th wedding anniversary celebration they both attended. However, it is not necessary to wait for special social events to occur in order to build relationships. It may be enough to engage in the daily life of the community members. For instance, both Mark Henderson and Robin Semer try to sit down and have lunch with community members on a daily basis. For Robin Semer, being integrated with the community is very important:

So we would line up with the students to eat lunch with them, so we would be on the line in their cafeteria and just sit down on their benches and eat that way. I've been with other EWB groups that are a little more peripheral than we are. We tried to be as integrated as we could be integrated, when we went on our trips.

Ken Kastman also shares the same line of thought and he also engages with the community in many informal ways:

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We like to interact and try to be a part of the community, to stay in the community, to eat their food, to sleep in their beds, to get together at community meetings, to play soccer with them, and play with the kids at night.

For Andrew, playing soccer with community members is another great way to allow the community to relax around them and create a strong working relationship:

Soccer then is a way for the community to say, “We have things that we can do better than you.” That then allows them to reach down to us and supply things for us. “We are out of breath, do you have some water? We need some things from you, can you help us North Americans out?” That then sets a good social interaction dynamic where we are then endeared to them and they are endeared then to us.

In sum, building trusted relationships is a key feature of successful and sustainable projects. It requires considerable time to build trust. Engineers thus have to make sure that they budget this time upfront and should not be worried about being flexible with their plans in order to attend social events like weddings and other local festivities that will ultimately make things go more smoothly. Having trust then allows them to maintain open communication with the community and to switch from a needs-based approach to an asset/strengths-based approach.

7.3 Using an Asset/Strengths-Based Approach The idea of using an asset- or strength-based approach emerged especially from the interviews with Andrew, Emily Wigley, and Michael, but many aspects of this approach were also present in some of the ideas of other participants.

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In talking about his approach to HE, Andrew explains that he prefers to follow an “Asset-Based Community Development” approach. He explains that this approach is not “a defined process,” bur rather it is enabled “though developing organic relationships within the community.” The main characteristic of this approach is that it focuses on finding out about a community’s assets. He further explains that an asset-based community development approach helps discover assets that might not be apparent and shows engineers that the community may be ultimately the main resource to drawn on:

We usually think in terms of money to buy things, tools to build things and materials to build them from. When you look at a project that way, they community looks pretty poor. However, when we start looking at assets like natural nearby resources, close-knit family structures, a strong work ethic, strong social and spiritual structures that can motivate and mobilize the work force, and cooperation from the local government, etc. We soon see the community’s contribution to the project taking on a much bigger role than our own.

Similarly, Michael explains that the NGO he works for prefers to use a strength-based approach, which is very aligned with Andrew’s asset-based approach. He explains that his organization begins projects by focusing on the resources and the expertise already present in the community, because of the risks associated with looking only at the negatives:

We use [an approach] called strength-based approach, where we look at what the community is doing well, rather than focus on the deficit and the

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negative, and the barriers, and the problems, because that can be quite disempowering.

With an asset- or strength-based approach, rather than looking at what a community is lacking, engineers can instead start from looking at what the community already has and is doing, and supporting them in their endeavors:

Once we identify what people are doing in their own community then we can begin to ask, “Is there a way that we can help enable them to do more?” [Emily Wigley]

This way of thinking can be much more productive and can also lead to much more diverse projects than though a needs-based approach:

We found in some of our longer-term projects that we can move to an asset based assessment instead and get much more diverse projects than just doing a needs-based assessment. Through asset-based assessment we’ve identified projects like a tilapia farm, solar medical waste incinerators, sand harvesting, and business development. In sum, engineers tend to focus on problems to be solved, which, as suggested by

many participants can foster a deficit mindset, which in turn can become very discouraging and disempowering for the community. To address this issue, a few participants proposed to reframe their approach to humanitarian engineering by switching to an asset-based approach, which holds the assumption that the community is rich of local expertise from which to build on.

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7.3.1 Local Expertise As illustrated in the previous paragraphs, the key aspect of using an asset-based approach is to recognize the value of local knowledge and expertise and to integrate these resources into every aspect of doing a project. However, recognizing the value of local knowledge and expertise was not a theme that emerged only from the interviews of the participants who mentioned explicitly using an asset-based approach, but it was present in many other interviews. For instance, during his travel in a rural region of an African country, George noticed that although the houses looked very humble and technically simple, in realty they were quite sophisticated from a thermal transfer point of view:

if you go in there and take a look, you realize that the homes even though they are mud huts are built slightly differently every five meters of elevation. The walls have a certain shape, they get the mud from a certain place, they orient them in a certain way, they design their long drops in a certain way. It’s really pretty exclusive when you talk about thermal transfer.

These details regarding the houses of that specific village demonstrates that there are people in the community that might have lots of expertise that is very valuable for building infrastructure. This is, in fact, what Ken Kastman observed when he worked on a construction project in Central America. He noticed that because concrete mixers do not usually exist or they are usually broken, the local population came up with a very effective way to mix concrete on the ground by hand:

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They mix aggregate in a big circle, and they add water and they mix it again using shovels. In the Central American countries, this is how they build their homes, and they're quite good at it.

In her project in Guatemala, Robin Semer and her team similarly rely heavily on a local handyman to rig things and make things work. She observes that his talent is very useful for many different aspects of the projects:

There's a person who's very handy at Ak'Tenamit who is able to rig things up to make things work, and does do those kind of things sometimes to implement. He's somebody who has a lot of talent, and does go out of his way to make ... to fix things and make things work better. I would say that he winds up putting together things that we're impressed with and that help out the project.

Yet, the most admirable example of the great contribution of local expertise come from a story that Andrew shared. In order to build a bridge, Andrew and his team were excavating in the side of the riverbank to construct a cofferdam (“essentially a dug out area that was deeper than the river bottom in order to construct a concrete abutment foundation” [Andrew]). This was a very tedious and messy process that “required a lot of persistence to remove water faster than it was leaking into our site” [Andrew]. One morning, this became very challenging because “the excavation pit was full of water like a swimming pool” [Andrew]. In order to solve the problem, he laid out a plan to use a gas powered pump to pump the water out; a process that would have taken a few hours to accomplish. When he shared the idea with the local community members that were helping out with the construction, the locals showed their expertise by using a siphon

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technique that solved the problem in a fraction of the time that Andrew had originally predicted:

They placed one end of the pipe downstream of our cofferdam and the other end of the pipe in our cofferdam. They then filled the PVC pipe full of water and with a signal, told the man holding the downstream end of the pipe to release the pipe opening. As soon as he did, the men standing in the cofferdam pool of water thrust their end of the pipe into the pool and wouldn’t you know, the pipe sucked the water completely out of the pool in just about 20 minutes. [Andrew]

Impressed by the ingenuity of the locals’ technique, he realized the value of integrating local knowledge into his projects and began using an asset-based approach.

7.4 Chapter Summary In this chapter, I reported on the themes that emerged from the thematic analysis of participants’ responses to broader questions related to their approach to HE. The thematic analysis revealed the sociotechnical and interdisciplinary nature of HE projects. Many of the participants explicitly commented that the technological aspects of these projects are the easiest part to solve. The greatest struggles are instead related to cultural differences, communication challenges, and the problem of ownership, issues that also appeared in the previous chapters. Participants generally agreed that building trusted relationships is one the most important aspects to ensure the success and sustainability of a project, a theme that has also merged in chapter 4 from the analysis of the collected literature. Trust enables community members to express their opinions and desires freely, which is extremely important to make sure that any implemented solution reflects the desires of

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the community members. Trust also enables engineers to use an assets- or strengths- based approach, which relies on integrating the knowledge and expertise of the local community. However, trust does not automatically mean that engineers recognize community members as experts. In fact, an asset-based approach requires some of the skills reported in chapter 4 (4.3), especially including a mindset that allows engineers to see community members as “actors in their own development instead of viewing them as victims” (Bayars et al., 2009, 2714). However, building trust is not a simple task. In chapter 6, I discussed some of the methods that many participants found very helpful to build trust. For instance, participatory mapping is a very useful tool in order to allow community members to get more comfortable around foreign engineers. Yet, many participants explained that the best way to build trust is to take the time to be with the community. Some participants talked about having meals and playing soccer with the community as very important tools of community interactions. Others expressed the importance of attending social events and other local festivities, like weddings and other types of celebrations. Therefore, when planning to visit the community, it becomes very important that engineers budget the time to interact informally with community members, even if the trips are as short as one week. In fact, focusing only on project activities might not allow them to build the trust that is needed to develop sustainable solutions. Looking more broadly at the four finding chapters, it emerges clearly that in HE the social aspects are as consequential as the technical aspects. Engineers need to learn how to navigate the social aspects and interact with the community. Chapter 5 provided a framework of formal techniques that can help engineers and other professional navigate

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the social world of HE and meaningfully interact with the community. This last chapter revealed that in addition to formal methods, there are many informal strategies that can do and need to specific training. Most importantly among these informal strategies is the idea of taking time to attend in social events (e.g., weddings and festivals) and participate in the daily life of the community, like by playing soccer, having meals, and stay at the community members houses. In the next chapter, I summarize and discuss the findings in chapter 4 to 7 as they related to the two research questions and the broader literature. I also present recommendations, discuss limitations, and propose ideas for future areas of research.

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CHAPTER 8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Humanitarian engineering programs are becoming very popular in many U.S. institutions, as well as worldwide. However, the projects undertaken by participants in such programs often involve considerable tensions between the needs of students and those of the communities the programs are trying to serve. This tension can be very problematic, especially in light of colonialist historical legacies and many documented instances of failed projects (Mazzurco et al., 2014; Riley, 2007). This dissertation attempts to address this tension by investigating principles, mindsets, and especially methods that may facilitate community participation so that these programs may benefit partner communities as much as they benefit students. Specifically, the goal of this dissertation is to create the foundation for a learning platform, which students, faculty, and potentially even professionals can use to learn about methods and strategies to facilitate the participation of underserved community in each phase of the HE design process.

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The research questions associated with this goal were:

1. What are the key characteristics of specific design methods that have been used/proposed in the HE and related literature?

In section 8.1, I explain how the findings reported in Chapters 4 through 7 help answer the two research questions, and I relate the findings to the broader literature on HE and related fields. In section 8.2, I discuss other relevant and interesting themes that were not directly related to the research questions, but that emerged mostly from the interviews with the 14 participants. In each section, I provide recommendations for individuals who are interested in HE and similar projects. In section 8.3, I present my dissemination plan and ideas to translate my research into practice. Finally, in section 8.4, I discuss possible ideas for future research.

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8.1 Discussion of Findings In this section, I first discuss the findings related to RQ1 and I relate them to other literature. Then I do the same for the findings related to RQ2.

8.1.1 Discussion of Findings Related to RQ1 To answer the first research question, I dove into the literature to examine what strategies and methods have been suggested by other authors. First, as reported in Chapter 4, I looked more generally at what types of methods had been used and suggested in 48 papers that I acquired using a qualitative systematized review process. I clustered these 48 papers based on six different groups of methods. The first group comprised publications that mentioned traditional social science research methods, such as interviews, surveys, participant observations, and focus groups. Social science methods were the most commonly mentioned among the 48 papers, and they were also very common among the 14 participants I interviewed after reviewing the literature. In fact, virtually all participants reported doing house-to-house surveys and interviews. In addition to social science research, the 48 papers I reviewed discussed using other types of methods as well. A second, popular type of method involved use of design tools. Design tools build off traditional social science research methods and apply them specifically to the design process. These sources cited human-centered design techniques like those collected in IDEO (2014)’s toolkit. A third group of papers, as reviewed in Chapter 4, reported using methods that derive from the Participatory Action Research tradition and specifically the more critical tradition of educator Paulo Freire. This group included methods like Rapid/Participatory Rural Appraisal and Theater of the Oppressed among the many ways of facilitating community participation.

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The fourth group of papers was clustered together, because they all had the common characteristics of allowing the identification and characterization of stakeholders. These included publications that presented methods like the arena model (Bowen and Acciaioli, 2015), which suggests a process to develop a sophisticated map of all stakeholders involved. A fifth set of papers were grouped together because they presented methods that provided ways to evaluate options and to make decisions regarding different aspects a project. The sixth cluster included a small collection of papers that focused on strategies that would help engineers and other professionals raise awareness of their own beliefs, biases, and pre-existing understandings. However, grouping the methods based on the six types or “families” provides only a general overview of the possible types of methods that humanitarian engineers could use in their projects. Moreover, there are many overlaps among the six types. For instance, social science research methods like interviews, focus groups, and participant observation are also included in human-centered design toolkits (e.g. IDEO) and used in participatory action research projects (e.g., Beebe, 2011). In sum, the analysis that led to the development of Chapter 4 provided a broad view of what methods have been used/proposed in HE and related literature. This allowed me to answer my first research question only partially, and a more complete answer to my research question was obtained through further analysis of 64 methods that were collected from the original 48 papers and other snowballed sources. The analysis of the 64 methods led to the development of a use-inspire framework that classifies methods along two main dimensions (as reported in Chapter 5). The first dimension is levels of community participation, which comprises three distinct levels:

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passive, consultative, and co-constructive. Methods in the passive level comprise techniques that do not directly involve community members. Yet even if those methods do not include community members, they are still potentially valuable methods that may provide many advantages. For instance, although IDEO’s “Beginners’ Mind” does not involve community members, it can help engineers, designers, students, and others develop a mindset that may facilitate interactions with community members. In consultative methods, community members are involved as informants, who are consulted by the outsiders. The typical consultative methods are interviews and focus groups. The third and final level of community participation is co-constructive. This level includes methods in which community members collaborate to construct knowledge with the facilitation of engineers. Participatory mapping (Almedom et al., 1997; Beebe, 2001; Freudenberger, 2008; PeaceCorps, 2005) is a good example of a co-constructive method. During this exercise, community members collaborate to create a map of their own community, while facilitators provide directions and probe community members. The three levels are ordered in a hierarchical spectrum from less participatory to more participatory. However, this spectrum does not range from worst to best, as each level provides its own advantages and limitations (as reported in Chapter 6 and further discussed in section 8.1.2), and in any given project engineers could use methods representing all three levels. In the literature I found only one other example that classified design methods based on considerations related to direct user involvement. The Helen Hamlyn Center for Design presents 20 design methods to develop solutions for people with disabilities. For each method, they provide four characteristics 1) the inputs and outputs, 2) stage of

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design process, 3) designing for, with, or by, and 4) types of interaction (Helen Hamlyn Center for Design, 2015). Their designing for, with, or by category is the one that is most closely related to my levels of community participation. Therefore, it is worth discussing how their framework differs from mine.

To begin, their “for people” category includes methods “in which designers study and consult people in their role as experts in the design process” (Helen Hamlyn Center for Design, 2015, para. 3). Next, their “with people” category comprises methods “in which designers share the design process with people, who become active participants in the work” (Helen Hamlyn Center for Design, 2015). Finally, their “by people” category includes methods in “which designers act as facilitators to enable people to make their own design decisions” (Helen Hamlyn Center for Design, 2015).

On one hand, their categorization of methods based on direct user involvement has some similarities to the one proposed in this dissertation. For instance, their “by people” category is well aligned with my “co-constructive” level because in both cases designers act as facilitators. On the other hand, there are many differences between their framework and mine. At first glance, their “for people” category would seem to match with my passive level. For instance, they categorize the “empathy tool” as a “for people” method. The empathy tool proposes that designers use “a simulation device to gain first- hand insights into particular impairments or disabilities.” In this exercise, direct users do not participate and therefore I would have classified it as passive. However, they also classify interviews and focus groups as “for people,” which instead are categorized as consultative in my framework. Therefore, while there might be some alignment between the “by people” and co-constructive categories, the other categories do not match.

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Additionally, based on their classification system, methods can be categorized under two or three categories. For instance, their “Observation & Shadowing” tool is described as both “for people” and “with people.” However, it is not clear what it means when a method is classified under more than one type of interaction with direct users.

The second dimension that emerged from the analysis of the 64 methods is project stages. Specifically, I clustered the methods in three stages: 1) problem framing and planning, 2) information gathering, and 3) solution development. Each of project stage is divided in sub-categories based on the functions of the methods. The problem framing and planning stage includes methods that serve four different, but related goals: 1) understanding a problem, 2) formulating objectives, 3) ranking problem or objectives, and 4) planning project activities. The information gathering stage includes methods that serve five different, but complementary goals: 1) fostering self-awareness, 2) multipurpose, 3) understanding socio-cultural, political and historical context, 4) identifying and characterizing stakeholders, and 5) mapping the community. The solution development stage include only two sub-categories: 1) methods to ideate and prototype a solution, and 2) methods to evaluate and select solutions. This categorization was developed by clustering together methods based on their function rather than imposing a pre-defined configuration of stages on the methods. Nonetheless, the resulting categorization covers many of the more traditional design stages. To understand further this dimension, it is worth comparing it with some existing classifications. For instance, the Helen Hamlyn Center for Design (2016), as discussed above, also classifies their twenty methods in terms of stages of design process. Specifically, they suggest a classification system that comprises four different stages: 1)

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discover, 2) define, 3) develop, and 4) deliver. The discover stage refers to “exploration- and-understand,” which appears to be aligned with the information gathering phase. The define stage focuses on the problem, which therefore might be aligned with the problem framing and planning phase. The develop and deliver stage instead refers to designing and producing the solution, which might be aligned with the solution development phase. However, comparing my framework to theirs is difficult because while they propose four stages, the description of all the 20 methods suggest that all are “discover” methods, even “prototyping” (this may be due to a glitch in their website). Given the provided information, our classification systems appear to be very similar, although mine provides more nuances within each project stage category. It is also worth comparing the project stages provided in this dissertation with the design process for engineering for global development (EGD) proposed by Engineering for Change (E4C). More specifically, E4C’s design process for EGD comprises five stages: 1) plan, 2) learn, 3) design, 4) realize, and 5) sustain (Engineering For Change, 2016). The plan phase focuses on developing project goals and planning strategies to achieve them, which seems aligned with my problem framing and planning phase, although theirs is much more focused on planning instead of framing. Their learn phase is clearly aligned with my information gathering phase as it includes considerations related to customer and user knowledge and design ethnography. Their design phase is also well aligned with my solution development phase as it looks specifically at conceptualizing and prototyping solutions. The realize and sustain phases refer to activities aimed at producing and then sustaining a solution, which were stages that none of the methods I collected referred to.

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Comparing my project dimensions with existing classifications provides a couple of points of reflection regarding the usefulness of, as well as some gaps in, the proposed framework. For instance, the alignment between my three stages and some of the stages of E4C’s design process suggests that the framework reflects the typical process followed by humanitarian engineers and therefore it can be closely related to practice and integrated in existing models. Casting a wider net, the framework proposed here can support the practice of a wider range of individuals involved in HE and similar projects, including students, faculty, and professionals. Those individuals, in fact, could easily access methods based on where they are in the project cycle and what specific tasks they are trying to accomplish. For instance, if they need to learn more about all of the people that might be involved directly or indirectly in a project, they could access “information gathering methods” (section 5.2.2), and choose one or more methods in the function group “to identify and characterize stakeholders” (section 5.2.2.3).

However, the comparison with existing traditional design cycles also reveals a gap in the framework presented here. Specifically, the framework does not include methods that belong to E4C’s realize and sustain phase. Moreover, the large majority (77%) of the methods collected belong to the problem framing and gathering information phases (27% and 50%), while only 15 methods (23%) belonged to the solution development phase. These 15 methods also cover a small range of tasks, focusing only on early ideation, prototyping, and solution selection, and the majority of these (9 out of 15) were passive. However, they do not cover tasks usually associated with more advanced phases of design and implantation of solutions. There are a few hypothetical reasons that could explain this gap.

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First, the gap might be due to limitations related to the literature review process employed to retrieve the sources, although the large number of search strings and the inter-reliability process help ensure that a large, representative sample of related literature was collected. A second reason is that as the later stages of an engineering project become more focused on the technical aspects of the solution, it may require a level of technical expertise and access to laboratories that are not usually available in underserved communities. The involvement of the community might then be limited to volunteered labor. A third and related possible reason is that methods used during the later stages of a project might be dependent to the specific solution being developed, while the collected methods are independent of any specific solution. For instance, constructing a problem tree may be beneficial to any project. Fourth, it is also possible that there are not formal methods to involve community members in the later phases of a project and that their involvement happens more informally and more on a consultative level. Finally, it is also plausible that this lack could be associated with the historically dominant approach to international development, namely, dropping in solutions and then leaving the communities without considering long-term sustainability. At project’s end, outsiders return home and the community members remain, so they know best how well the project endured over time—not those back home writing articles for publication, especially if the locals and outsiders lose contact, which often occurs over time.

Although the framework and collection of methods reported in this study might be limited to the earlier phases of a project, it still provides many useful methods to make sure that a partner community gets involved in a project. These methods can become very useful in avoiding failures. In a previous study in which I analyzed cases of failed

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projects (Mazzurco and Jesiek, 2014), I found that a primary reason that led to such failures is that foreigners did not fully understand the context of their project. For instance, in The Stranger’s Eye case study (Carlson, 1995), a foreign development worker, Pierre, went to a village in Mali to install a mill that could be used to grind grain. However, after a month of being in the village, Pierre found out that the village already had a mill and that he was installing the mill directly across from the existing one:

Pierre came as a stranger to Kafinare, asking no questions. It was nearly a month before he realized that he was putting a mill directly across the road from the existing one. In true Kafinarian fashion, no one told him that we already had one because he had not asked. When the truth eventually dawned, he protested in some shock that he would never have dreamed of running the enterprising villagers out of business, but then he plunged ahead with the plans on ORB's [an aid organization] drawing board (Carlson, 1995).

Such an issue might have been prevented if Pierre had used community-mapping methods like transect walks and participatory mapping. These methods could have shown to Pierre the existence of the mill much earlier on, so that he could have changed his plan and make sure that the solution he was installing was aligned with and respected the context and needs of the community. Failing to learn about the context of a project is not the only source of problems that can lead to negative outcomes. Citing Hammer (1994), Riley (2007) provide the following list of recommendations that international NGOs and other agencies should take into consideration when undertaking international aid projects:

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1. “Projects should be formulated in and by the communities that will ultimately benefit” (p. 3).

2. “On-site feasibility studies must be undertaken before a project begins to ensure that it has a chance of success” (p. 3).

3. “Autonomy and economic independence, and the ability to maintain or repair technology are key factors in the long-term sustainability of any project” (p. 4).

4. “Projects require thorough market analyses that include an assessment of actual production costs, and time people have available to do the required work” (p. 4).

5. “The appropriateness of a technology should be assessed for the specific community in which it may be implemented. This requires being in the field with the recipient community for some time” (p. 4).

6. “Flexibility is required so that the project can evolve over time” (p. 4). 7. “Responsibility does not end when the funding ends. The limitations on people’s

availability must be made known up front before a project begins.” (p. 4) 8. “Communication and networking are essential.” (p. 4) 9. “Insurance should be provided so that if a project fails the community does not

end up bearing debt” (p. 4). 10. “Know who each partner is in a project, and what they are interested in gaining

from the project. Groups that are established and cohesive are more likely to stay together” (p. 4)

The set of methods provided in this dissertation address many of the recommendation listed above. For instance, to make sure that the community takes part in the formulation of a project (recommendation #1 above), humanitarian engineers can choose among the

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consultative and co-consultative methods to understand a problem (section 5.2.1.1) and rank objectives (section 5.2.1.3). To make sure the technology is appropriate to the context of the specific community (recommendation #5), humanitarian engineers can organize a participatory design session (IDEO, 2014), in which community members would ideate and create prototypes of solutions. In conclusion, the first phase of this doctoral study provides two major contributions to the literature. First, it provides an extensive collections of methods that support community participation in HE while at the same time addressing important factors traditionally associated with the success of global development projects. Second, it provides a framework that allows humanitarian engineers to select methods to use based on the function of the method and the desired level of community participation. The framework could also be used as a reflection tool. For instance, by looking at the levels of community participation, humanitarian engineers could reflect on how they are interacting with the community and potentially improve their interactions. Finally, while having a set if methods can be very useful, methods are only one important part of HE projects. In the next sections, I discuss other important considerations that emerged from the interviews with the 14 practitioners who elected to participate in my study.

8.1.2 Discussion of Findings Related to RQ2 The second research question focused on understanding what conditions may be needed to use the methods that I had collected in the first phase of the research and, more generally, what other aspects might be important to facilitate community participation. To answer this research question, I interviewed 14 practitioners who have extensive experience in HE and similar projects. Nine participants were affiliated with universities,

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while the other five were professionals who volunteer their time to work on HE projects or were employed in international NGO focused on HE. During the interview, I shared 21 methods from the 64 that I collected and asked them to comment on their familiarity with the methods, and to share their impression related to possible advantages and pitfalls using these methods. The participants used only a small portion of the methods I shared, but they commented they had used methods that covered similar functions to those that I had shared. The two participants that appeared to be the most familiar with the methods were David Frossard and Gary Burniske, who were also the only two interviewees without engineering degrees and with work experience through positions in international development organizations (the Peace Corps and the Mercy Corps, respectively). Other participants also admitted that they had benefited greatly from having team members with diverse disciplinary and experiential backgrounds. This fact points out the helpfulness of having a multi-disciplinary team, which was also one of the five principles that emerged from analyzing the 48 papers I had collected during the first phase. In explaining their model for sustainable HE, for example, Amadei et al. (2009) recognized that engineers should team up with “sociologists, economists, anthropologists, public health experts, and others” (p. 1095). Garff et al. (2013) also suggests that while having a set of methods that help co-create solutions (like those presented in previous chapters), the participation of social scientist would help engineers use these methods in more rigorous and systematic ways. Consequently, including individuals from other disciplines and diverse backgrounds is the first condition that would enable humanitarian engineers to use the collected methods appropriately.

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Furthermore, the participants also commented on some potential advantages of some methods. The most popular among those methods was co-constructive participatory mapping. In this method, a group of community members collaborate to create a map of the community with the facilitation of development workers. Many participants reported that this method can be a great icebreaker and help put the community at ease with the foreigners. This, in turn, allows for building a strong relationship between foreigners and community members. Robin Semer reported using a similar co-constructive method in which her host community drew their vision of the sanitation system rather than a map. However, the effect was the same of participatory mapping as it allowed Robin Semer and her team to make the first steps toward building a trusted relationship with the community partners. This finding suggests that co-constructive methods might be more conducive to creating trust among all people involved in a project, because it involves communities in a more active way and positions foreigners as learners rather than experts. However, the interviews with the 14 participants also revealed four main challenges associated with using some of these methods (as reported in Chapter 6). The first challenge was associated with practical limitations of using co-constructive methods. Some of these methods in fact may require materials like flip charts, pens, and physical space that might not be always available. Another practical challenge is that they may also require time that community members cannot realistically commit. Additionally, the educational level of the community members may hinder their ability to participate, as some participants commented that they had seen some of these methods used with formally educated people. The second challenge is associated with communication barriers. These barriers include both languages differences and choice of words in asking

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questions. Translators can also create a communication barrier if they are not committed to a project. The third challenge emerges from cultural differences from foreigners and local community members. Such differences can influence the interpersonal interactions, but can also determine the cultural appropriateness of using a method. For instance, wealth ranking (Freudenberger, 2008) was considered generally inappropriate by many participants. The last challenge concerned ethical considerations related to human subjects research. These considerations were especially strong for methods that utilize photos, like photovoice. The participants, in fact, advised following strong policies related to informed consent and to get IRB approval before travelling. The aforementioned challenges align with challenges reported in the participatory design literature. For instance, Oyugi et al. (2008) share that participatory design in the developing world may be challenged by power distance between host communities and the designers, cultural and language barriers, inappropriateness of participatory design techniques due to local values, and low literacy levels of host communities. In reflecting on her design project with Cambodian children to create prosthetic legs, Hussain et al. (2012) additionally shares four categories of challenges that align closely to those reported by my participants: “1) human aspects, 2) social, cultural, and religious aspects, 3) financial aspects and timeframe, and 4) organizational aspects” (Hussain et al., 2012, p. 93). Similar to what was shared by my participants, Hussain et al. (2012) explain that participating in design workshops was many times an unrealistic time commitment for the locals, and that the local customs and religious beliefs limited participants’ willingness to share frank opinions with the designers.

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In conclusion, while the first part of this research focused on classifying methods to facilitate their use, the second phase explored the realities of using such methods. Although I do not have definitive evidence, it appears that co-constructive methods might be great icebreakers while helping to foster trust among foreigners and community members. The co-constructive methods, however, possess many practical challenges. Therefore, it might be useful to use co-constructive methods when establishing the partnership and until trust has been established. Once there is trust between communities and engineers, then less participatory methods can be used as the community will be more inclined to express their thoughts frankly. Yet no matter the methods used, engineers still have to address communication, cultural, and ethical challenges.

These challenges also suggest that humanitarian engineers should be properly trained to use the methods collected and should develop some of the competencies that were reported in Chapter 4 (section 4.3). Engineers should develop a humble mindset that allows them to recognize the richness of expertise that exists in developing communities (Aslam et al.; 2014; Bayars et al., 2009; Hilton et al., 2014; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Mattson and Wood, 2014; Vandersteen et al. 2009), and critical self-awareness to continually examine one’s own behaviors and beliefs (Aslam et al., 2014; Hilton et al., 2014; Hussain et al., 2012; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Niesuma and Riley, 2010; Pearson,1996; White, 1997). They should also develop strong cross-cultural and communication skills (Hussain and Sanders, 2010; Murphy et al., 2009; Ogunyoku et al., 2011), especially an ability to listen contextually (Leydens and Lucena, 2009, 2014). Such abilities would allow engineers to use appropriately the methods presented in

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Chapter 5. Yet, these competencies are not only limited to HE, but are also relevant to engineering in general. For instance, NAE’s Engineer of 2020 mentions communication competencies and high ethical standards as key attributes of the engineer of 2020.

8.1.3 Integrating Phase 1 and 2 As reported above, during phase 1 of this study I collected 64 methods from the literature and I analyzed them in order to create a classification system. This process was very useful to better understand the key characteristics of each method. However, it did not allow me to understand some of the benefits and limitation of using each method on the field. The second phase was meant to complement the first phase by collecting insights from practitioners who had extensive experience working in humanitarian engineering and similar projects. This last phase enabled me to understand limitations and benefits of methods as expressed by practitioners. In this section I show how the two phases can be integrated to create use-inspired information sheets that provide more practical details about methods. In figure 8.1 I provide a template of such an information sheet. Each information sheet features seven pieces of information: 1) name of the method, 2) the purpose of the method, 3) a visualization of the method, which could be a representation of the final outcome or a representation of the process, 4) which project stage and participation level the method belongs to, 5) a brief description of the process (i.e., steps), 6) insights (positive or negative) from practitioners, and 7) links to original sources. Part one to five and seven were gathered during phase 1, while part 6 was gathered during phase 2. The information sheet, thus, presents most of the information a humanitarian engineer needs to have in order to use the method appropriately. In figure 8.2 and 8.3, I show two examples of

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information sheets, namely for the methods Wealth Ranking and Participatory Mapping. I chose to represent these two methods because practitioners provided insights directly related to these two methods, while they provided more general insights for other methods. Future research may focus on gathering specific insights from practitioners for each method so that similar information sheets can be created for all 64 methods.

Figure 8.1. Template of Information Sheet

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Figure 8.2. Info Sheet for Wealth Ranking

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Figure 8.3. Info Sheet for Participatory Mapping

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8.1.4 Appropriateness of Methods As I discussed in the first chapter of this dissertation, my goal was not only to collect methods to involve community members but also to understand what conditions are required to use the methods appropriately. While I do not have data to discuss the appropriateness of every single method, my research allows me to provide a few guidelines that may help engineers use methods more appropriately. To begin, the interviews with practitioners and the review of literature stressed the importance of building trusted relationships from the beginning of a project. Practitioners have also identified co-constructive methods, such as Participatory Mapping, as good relationship builders. Thus, it should be more appropriate to use co-constructive methods especially (but not only) during the first interactions. However, co-constructive methods are also subject to many practical limitations, especially because they may require more intensive participation time from community members. Therefore, while co-constructive methods can be very beneficial, engineers need to be very careful not to overuse them. Moreover, if the relationship has already been established, it becomes more appropriate to use less formalized and time-consuming methods. Additionally, the practitioners also discussed communication, culture, and ethical challenges related to using the methods. If these challenges are not properly addressed and taken into account even when using relatively simple method like interviews, they can lead to inappropriate dynamics, which may in turn create distrust and ruin the relationship. Consequently, before using any method, engineers should properly train themselves and improve competencies and attribute such as empathy, cross-cultural communication and behavioral skills, contextual listening skills, and critical self-

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awareness. Therefore, it becomes critically important to develop and use self-awareness tools (5.2.2.1) before engaging in any interaction with communities. Finally, it is very important to ground the use of methods in well-established and comprehensive philosophical and methodological commitments. For instance, engineers could use Leydens and Lucena’s (2014) social justice criteria to guide their choice and use of methods. Specifically, Leydens and Lucena (2014) provide six SJ criteria to guide humanitarian and other type of engineering practice: “1) listening contextually, 2) identifying structural conditions, 3) acknowledging political agency/mobilizing power, 4) increasing opportunities and resources, 5) reducing imposed risks and harms, and 6) enhancing human capabilities” (p. 6). Many of the methods to understand a problem (5.2.1) can also be very useful to meet SJ criteria 2. For instance, Problem Tree (Chevalier & Buckles, 2008) provides a way to visualize problems and their causes, while Timeline (Chevalier & Buckles, 2008) may enable engineers to understand the historical roots of a problem. Similarly, to meet SJ criteria 3, engineers may select from and use many different methods to identify and characterize stakeholders (5.2.2.4). In sum, the appropriateness of the methods depends on many factors including addressing specific challenges, skills and attributes of the participating engineers, training, and philosophical commitments. Engineers should take considerable care in properly learning about and selecting what methods to use, as any method used inappropriately could lead to many negative results.

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8.2 Broader Considerations In this section I discuss some emergent themes that were not directly related to my research question, but that are still worth exploring because they provide insights on other considerations that may be helpful to facilitate community participation and ensure the long-term success of HE projects. First, I discuss trust and social interactions. Second, I focus on asset-based development and its potential application to HE projects. Then, I discuss the sociotechnical nature of HE and I connect it to the broader literature on engineering practice and socio-technical dualism. I conclude with some reflections regarding students’ involvement in service-learning courses.

8.2.1 Trust and Social Interactions When asked what factors may influence the success of a project, many participants talked about building trusted relationships. This idea was probably best articulated by Marissa Jablonski: “without trust you cannot build and without trust no one is listening.” The lack of trust prevents having frank and open communication with community members, who will not express their perspectives openly if they do not trust outsiders. This was, for instance, the case that Marissa Jablonski observed regarding a bridge project of another international NGO in the same village she was working. Because the NGO had not established trust, nobody had told them that the community did not want nor need the bridge that they were going to build, and therefore the NGO proceeded with its construction anyway. Now, Marissa Jablonski observes that the bridge was never used. In contrast with this example, Emily Wigley and her teammates did not proceed with installing a water pump until they were sure that they had established a trusted relationship with all the main groups of the village. They in fact had noticed that a group

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of women had never showed real enthusiasm regarding the project and therefore they wisely waited until they were able to gain the trust that was needed for the women to share their concerns. The development of this relationship took almost two years, but it was worth it because it allowed Emily Wigley and her teammates to make sure to have the support of the entire community. Building trusted relationships was also one of the principles (Section 4.1.4) that emerged from the analysis of the 48 papers that I collected in the first phase of this study (e.g., Aslam et al., 2014; Hilton et al., 2014; Mehta and Mehta, 2011). For instance, Heil et al (2012) recognize that “an important component of any successful service learning project is the development of a working relationship with the target community and the establishment of trust.” Similarly, Chisolm et al. (2014) suggest investing “in activities to build trust with the community and facilitate open communication” (p. 532). A few papers also report that trust is a function of time (Garff et al., 2013; Hilton et al., 2014; Leydens and Lucena, 2014; Munoz, 2014), as also demonstrated by the aforementioned example shared by Emily Wigley. The literature, however, offered limited insights regarding strategies to promote trust, while the participants shared many interesting insights. As discussed earlier, co- constructive methods could be very useful in breaking the ice with a community and in laying the foundation for creating a trusted relationship. Yet, the most surprising aspect of what the participants shared was related to the importance of immersing themselves in the daily life of the community. This included having meals with community members, sojourning in community members’ houses, playing soccer with the local children, attending social events, like weddings and festivities. While not directly associated

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with trust, immersive experiences have been recognized to be very important for design, especially in terms of developing empathic designers. For instance, one of the main implication from Zoltowski et al.’s (2012) phenomenographic study on how students experience human-centered design was that “immersive experiences involving real clients and users were important in allowing the students to experience human-centered design in more comprehensive ways” (p. 49). While none of my participants explicitly mentioned empathy, it is clear that budgeting time to be with the community without doing traditional project activities has tremendous benefits for the success of projects.

8.2.2 Asset-Based Community Development The concept and practice of asset- or strength-based community development emerged from the interview with the practitioners (Chapter 7), but was not explicitly discussed by any of the 48 papers I collected and reviewed (Chapter 4). Andrew explained that the asset-based approach is based on the assumption that the community is rich in resources and expertise to build on. Emily Wigley adds that it starts by looking at what the community is already trying to achieve and focuses on supporting the community in achieve their pre-existing goals. Michael preferred using the term “strengths-based” approach, but the core idea is the same. He also notices that focusing only on needs can be very disempowering for a community, while a strengths-based approach may instead provide a more empowering process and lead to more sustainable projects. In fact, Emily Wigley noted that she and her team were able to initiate much more diverse and interesting projects once they were able to move to an asset-based approach. The asset-based approach requires practitioners to have a solid understanding of the assets available in the community, and a few participants discussed specific strategies

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to identify assets in a community. For instance, Emily Wigley used a “capacity inventory” to “assess skills in the community to see what can be supported.” David Frossard described a meeting in which he brings together the community to discuss what the community has rather than what they are lacking:

So we get in a big group meeting and instead of saying, "What are you lacking? What's wrong with this place? What is missing here?" We start by saying, with our flip-chart, we start by saying, "What do you have? What resources do you have?"

Another strategy to understand what local expertise is available is to study the hardware store of the community, as suggested by Ken Kastman:

Go into the hardware store and study the hardware store, and you see what's on the wall, and you see what tools they have, and you see what materials they have. Is there a lot of electrical equipment or virtually no electrical equipment? You get a reasonable understanding of the skillsets of the local people. It is not to say they can’t get skillsets nearby, but if we are looking for a welder, and you go into the hardware store and they have no welding supplies, they probably don't have any welders in the town.

However, the discussion of strategies regarding asset-based assessment of the community were limited to the three examples shared above. In the engineering-related literature that I reviewed in Chapter 4, asset-based community development was not explicitly mentioned, but some papers talked about aspects that align with the asset-based community development approach. A group of papers discussed the importance of harnessing local resources and expertise (Section

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4.1.2). For example, Mattson and Wood (2014) suggest that designers must recognize that “resource-poor individuals have valuable expertise in surviving in low resource environments and in understanding local materials and networks” (p. 2). A few authors also mentioned working closely with local experts, like carpenters (McDaniel, 2011), brickmakers (de Chastonay et al., 2012), and sculptors (Hussain and Sanders, 2012). Similar to what was suggested by Ken Kastman, a few papers discussed visiting local vendors and stores as way to identify local resources (Aslam et al., 2014; Barb and Everett, 2014; Magoon et al., 2010; Nieusma and Riley, 2010). The philosophy of asset-based community development also aligns with some of the considerations that were reported by papers that focused on the social justice, human rights, and ethical dimensions of HE (Section 4.1.3). For instance, Schneider et al. (2009) criticize traditional HE projects because in these projects, communities are usually defined “by what they lack” (p. 45). Aligned with the asset-based philosophy, they suggest that a community should be seen through the lenses of “its multiple social, cultural, and other assets and capacities, and most of all, its own dreams and aspirations” (p. 47). This idea is also directly related to some major aspects of the rights-based approach proposed by Bayars et al. (2009), especially in terms of recognizing communities as “actors in their own development instead of viewing them as victims” (p. 2714). The asset-based philosophy is a very promising framework for thinking about engineering for global development, and therefore it is worth discussing some of the non- engineering-related literature focused on asset-based community development. The origins of the asset-based community development (ABCD) can be traced back to Kretzmann and McKnight (1993). They assert that needs-based approaches

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present “only a one-sided negative view, which has often compromised, rather than contributed to, community capacity building” (Mathie and Cunningham, 2003, p. 476). In contrast, ABCD “rests on the principle that a recognition of strengths and assets is more likely to inspire positive action for change in a community than is an exclusive focus on needs and problems” (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003, p. 477). Beaulieau (2002) contrasted needs and asset-based approaches to community development and observed that needs- based approaches make “people consumers of services” (p. 4) and therefore create dependence on external agencies, while asset-based approaches seek to “build interdependencies” (p. 4) by identifying “ways that people can give of their talents” (p. 4). Further, ABCD’s focus on identifying and mobilizing assets also requires the use of methods specifically conceived for this purpose. Sharpe et al. (2000) discuss a list of assets-oriented community assessment methods, some of those closely related to information-gathering methods presented in Chapter 5. For instance, they suggest community workers should do “windshield and walking tours of communities,” a method very similar to transect walks (Freudenberger, 2008) or systematic walkabout (Almedom et al., 1997), during which workers drive or walk with local guides through the community and annotate important features of the community. Complementary to this method is the use of an assets map that focuses specifically on mapping physical assets and location of local institutions and organizations (Sharpe et al., 2000). They also suggest that community groups can be directly involved in creating assets maps, as it happens in participatory mapping (Almedom et al., 1997; Beebe, 2001; Freudenberger, 2008; PeaceCorps, 2005). Additionally, Sharpe et al. (2000) suggest using “inventories,” also mentioned by Emily Wigley in her interview, which are surveys to “catalogue and

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describe individual and organizational capacities” (p. 209). Finally, another method worth citing from Sharpe et al. (2000) is “visioning;” a workshop in which “a group of community stakeholders collectively define a shared dream of what their community can become” (p. 209). The envisioning exercise could be used as an alternative to some problem framing methods (Section 5.2.1 of this dissertation) that focus on needs and problems rather than community’s dreams and aspirations. In sum, the idea of an asset-based approach as a core aspect of HE emerged from the interviews with practitioners but was not fully unpacked by any of the papers I had collected during the first phase of this study. The potential of asset- or strengths-based approaches to foster long-term sustainability and community empowerment make it a worthwhile focus of discussion and future research.

8.2.3 The Sociotechnical Nature of Humanitarian Engineering Practice The interviews with the 14 participants provided many insights regarding the sociotechnical nature of HE practice. Many participants, in fact, shared that based on their experience "engineering is the easy part” of HE projects. The greatest challenges come from the social and the cultural aspects of these projects rather than the technical. This idea is probably best represented in Emily’s quote: “Engineers Without Borders is 80% sitting there listening and maybe 20% actual engineering.” There was in fact agreement among the participants that most of what they do is talk to people to create trust and build buy-in or ownership on the part of the community. These observations align very closely with the extant literature on engineering practice and the concept of sociotechnical dualism. For instance, Emily Wigley’s assertion that HE is 80% listening and 20% technical resonates with Trevelyan and Tilli’s

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(2007) finding that about 60% of engineering practice in industry is focused on interacting with other people. Moreover, the participants’ observations that is important to incorporate local and multidisciplinary expertise aligns very well with Trevelyan’s (2010) characterization of engineering as a “combined human performance, in which expertise is distributed among the participants and emerges from their social interactions” (p. 176). The findings of this dissertation therefore corroborate the argument that the social is as consequential as the technical in engineering practice (Bucciarelli, 2003; Bovy and Vinck, 2003; Faulkner, 2000; Jesiek et al., 2015; Stevens et al., 2015). Furthermore, suggesting a switch from a needs-based approach to an asset-based approach challenges the “Universalized Narratives” that conceptualize engineering as applied science and math, problem-solving, and making things (Pawley, 2009). This dissertation in fact proposes that engineering, especially in the context of international development, should be seen primarily as learning and facilitating collective action, and only secondarily as a technical practice, without forgetting that a culturally appropriate bridge that is not structurally solid might be as or more harmful than an unwanted bridge.

8.2.4 Students’ Involvement Although this dissertation did not explicitly investigate issues related to students’ involvement in HE projects, there were a few instances worth discussing in which participants shared insights regarding aspects of student involvement. For many participants, these experiences provide great learning opportunities for their undergraduate engineering students. For instance, David Munoz observed that the “learning experience is incredible” for undergraduate engineering students involved in HE. This observation aligns with the extant literature on both local and global service

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learning, which has suggested that students greatly benefit from these experiences. For instance, Litchfield et al. (2016) showed that EWB and non-EWB members had similar perceptions of their own technical competencies, but EWB members reported significantly higher perceptions of their own professional skills. Similarly, EPICS alumni perceived that their EPICS experience helped them prepare for the workplace (Huff et al., 2016). Thus, the participants of this study observed benefits for students that are well aligned with the extant literature on service learning. However, some participants also pointed out tensions between students’ learning and the value that these projects can provide for the community. For example, Robert observes that while students “get this huge cultural benefit” by being in a community, there also must “be a win-win for everyone involved for it to be sustainable.” The tension between students’ learning and addressing the needs of a community has been pointed out in critiques of engineering courses for global development. For instance, Riley (2007) observes that one problem with global service-learning classes is:

the inevitable competition between the educational needs of the engineering students and the community’s needs. Amadei’s use of the phrase “viewing the developing world as the classroom of the 21st century” is illustrative of the tension here – even with the best intentions, it becomes problematic to attempt to meet both sets of needs. (p. 6)

This tension is further exacerbated when considering that engineering students may not be experienced enough to offer expertise that might instead be readily available in the host country at an even cheaper cost:

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What relatively inexperienced engineering students have to offer development projects – namely a few years’ engineering school course experience and their physical labor – is modest and, generally, readily available (regionally if not locally) and more affordable (at least relative to the budgets of typical international student exchange programs). (Nieusma and Riley, 2010, p. 54)

These observations raise salient questions about the ethics of involving students in HE projects and may suggest that it might be wiser not to allow such involvement. However, one example shared by Marissa Jablonski may provide a different perspective on the involvement of students in HE and similar projects. In the interview, Marissa Jablonski shared an argument she had with one of her students during a field trip in Guatemala. One of her students was particularly stubborn and claimed that they needed to “force the village to understand” and listen to them because their solution was the right one. Marissa Jablonski got very frustrated with the situation, as she was not able to help the students understand the importance of listening to the community and build consensus and trust before moving on with any solution. She shared this frustration with her project partner, while they were alone:

I was just with him and I told him, I said “You know, I am really struggling. I know you heard the conflict between me and her in the field. I have been trying, I am trying to explain the importance of these three groups [EWB, local NGO, community] and how we need to listen more than we talk.

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She then goes on to express her concern with the participation of this student on the project:

I ended with “you know the problem is… she is coming again, because she is not graduating.” And this is what I said.

The reply from her project partner somewhat shocked her as he suggested that the problem was that she was not staying in the village:

And he looked at me and he said “that’s not the problem Marissa. The problem is… she should come more often. So, she understands how we do things. And how we think.”

Unexpectedly, Marissa Jablonski’s project partner was very eager to have foreign students participate in these projects. Marissa Jablonski’s project partner also emphasized that while building a water system is part of why they were collaborating, the real gain from these interactions is that they help “making the world a smaller place.” The examples shared from the interview with Marissa Jablonski suggest other kinds of considerations regarding the involvement of students in developing projects. While it does not mean that those students should participate at any cost, it suggests that project partners might be interested in student learning as well. In fact, four studies have found that project partners may decide to collaborate with universities because they are themselves interested in supporting students’ learning (Sandy and Holland, 2006; Stoecker and Tryon, 2009; Thompson, 2014; Worrall, 2007). Project partners are not only interested in the outcome produced by the students, but they especially “see themselves as having education and outreach roles, and their interactions with students helps fulfill their organizational missions” (Thompson, 2014, p.27). While these four studies refer to

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domestic service-learning partnerships, the same considerations may apply to international partnerships and future research would shed light on the motivations of project partners and community members in allowing students to visit their community to undertake HE projects.

8.3 Dissemination Plan and Research-to-Practice Ideas In this section, I present my plan for disseminating the results of this dissertation and ideas to translate my research to educational practice. To disseminate my research, I plan to leverage multiple scholarly outlets. I have already submitted a manuscript focused on the review of literature related to participation frameworks (section 2.6 of this dissertation) to IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. If successful, I will also submit an opinion paper in which I will present the participation ladder provided in Appendix C to the same journal. I would like to submit the findings presented in chapter 4 to the Journal of Humanitarian Engineering, an open access journal published by EWB – Australia. I believe that chapter 5 that presents methods and classification framework would be most beneficial for readers of the International Journal of Service-Learning in Engineering. Chapter 6 that is focused on benefits and challenges of participatory methods could be submitted to the International Journal of Design, because this journal is particularly interested in “cultural factors on design theory and practice” and has already published work focused on participatory design in developing countries (e.g., Hussain and Sanders, 2012). Chapter 7 presents the findings that best elucidated HE practice and, to some extent, challenges dominant images of engineers practice more generally. Therefore, I believe it could be a good fit for Engineering Studies.

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There are a few potential ways to translate this research into practice and reach students and practitioners. For instance, the findings of this dissertation could be integrated in existing introductory courses on engineering design like first engineering programs or in course focused on engineering in global context. Alternatively, the findings could also be presented in short workshops for EWB chapter or EPICS skills sessions, during which students could practice using some of the methods presented in Chapter 5. Another possibility would be to create an entire class focused on community- based participatory research in the context of engineering for global development. Furthermore, some of the methods could be integrated in existing international short-term projects like MIT’s International Development Design Summit and EWB-Australia’s Humanitarian Engineering Design Summit. To reach practitioners, my research could be presented in webinars organized by E4C and integrated in their new course on engineering for global development. Finally, the next major step in my research is to develop a learning platform where students, faculty, and professionals can learn about methods, strategies, and philosophy for HE projects. While this dissertation was use-inspired, the development of the platform will be user-centered or participatory, requiring extensive user research and co-development and testing of prototypes. A first step toward this goal could include the creation of a written field guide that could be published in Morgan & Claypool’s synthesis lectures on Global Engineering edited by Dr. Gary Downey and Dr. Kacey Beddoes or on Engineers, Technology and Society.

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8.4 Future Research This study has revealed multiple important insights regarding the practice of HE, but it has also shown that there are still many gaps to fill. In this section, I conclude this dissertation by discussing five possible future areas of research. First, while I was able to collect many methods for community participation, there are still aspects that need to be further explored. Due to limitations related to how the methods were described in their original sources, I was not able to categorize methods based on required materials, difficulty, and time (as for instance done by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design). This would require eliciting such information from a larger sample of experts in international development. The investigation on methods, however, should not be limited to Western professionals, but should also include communities that have interacted with humanitarian engineers. It would be very interesting to visit communities that have received humanitarian engineers to investigate their perception of the partnerships. This would be especially important as research on community perspectives in international development and HE is very limited. Second, interviewing a larger pool of humanitarian engineers and similar professionals would also allow investigating many other aspects of engineering for global development. For instance, while this dissertation pointed to the importance of trust and asset-based approaches, there is still much more to understand on this topic, including how these approaches can be integrated in HE practice. It would be also interesting to investigate the identity of these engineers and to how they navigate the technical and social aspects of their identity.

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Third, this dissertation also revealed a large gap in the literature regarding what competencies are needed to being effective in engineering for development projects. This line of research could also be integrated with the development of assessment instruments and interventions specifically conceived to develop those needed competencies. Scenario- based assessment instruments would be particularly fit for this purpose because they are grounded in realistic contexts of practice and are able to directly probe students’ ability rather than their perceptions (Jesiek and Woo, 2011). Due to their many advantages, they have been used to evaluate many professional competencies, including design skills and abilities (Adams et al., 2003; Atman et al., 2007; Atman and Bursic, 1996), adaptive expertise (Walker et al., 2006), aspects of global competencies (Downey et al., 2006; Jesiek et al., 2010), knowledge of global, societal, economic, and environmental contexts (McKenna et al., 2015), and sociotechnical thinking in the context of engineering and sustainable community development (Mazzurco et al., 2014). Fourth, there remain opportunities to investigate how to integrate concepts that emerged from this study, including asset-based approaches, trust building, etc., into current engineering curricula, and especially in traditional engineering science classes. Additionally, further research should focus on developing and assessing training initiatives for novices and experienced students and professionals to instill the mindsets and teach the methods that were found to be most important for successful humanitarian engineering projects. Finally, a major finding of this study is related to the importance of having strong project partners. Their role can be very important in many aspects of the projects, including to enhance the use of methods discussed in chapter 5. More research should

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focus on the roles of project partners in these projects. Additionally, previous studies have investigated the nature of partnerships in the context of local service-learning projects (e.g., Thompson, 2014). Future research should investigate the motivations, nature, structure, and the connections among community partners and other stakeholders in the context of humanitarian engineering projects.

8.5 Conclusion In this study, I investigated the many ways in which engineers could facilitate community participation in HE and similar projects. The final result is a use-inspired framework of methods that can help engineers and engineering students to choose methods that best fit their needs and philosophy. The interviews with the practitioners also provided great insights into the actual practice of HE. Examples from the interviewees can be very helpful to prepare novice engineers to do HE projects. Boyer’s Scholarship of Integration provided a useful and helpful framework to conduct this study, and I look forward to see other studies leveraging this framework. Finally, I hope the findings of this study can fuel lively discussion around the role of engineers in global development.

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APPENDICES

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Appendix A: Search Strings for Qualitative Systematized Review In table A.1, I report the search strings that I used for the QRS, the associated search ID, and the number of retrieved papers before dropping duplicates and applying inclusion criteria. Table A.2 reports the number of paper discarded and kept at each selection step and for each search string.

Table A.1. Search Strings, Their ID Numbers, and Number of Papers Found Search string Search ID Found "humanitarian engineering" 1 34 "humanitarian technology" 2 27 "sustainable development" AND "developing countries" AND students 3 15 "sustainable development" AND "developing world" 4 205 "sustainable development" AND underdeveloped 5 71 "sustainable development" AND "developing communities" 6 13 "sustainable development" AND underserved 7 10 "sustainable community development" 8 30 "participatory development" 9 67 participatory AND "developing countries" 10 158 participatory AND "developing world" 11 13 participatory AND "developing communities" 12 3 participatory AND underdeveloped 13 5 participatory AND underserved 14 5 "Community participation" AND engineering 15 87 "Community participation" AND "developing countries" 16 49 "Community participation" AND "developing world" 17 9 "Community participation" AND underserved 18 2 "Community participation" AND underdeveloped 19 0 "Poverty alleviation" AND engineering 20 82 "social justice" AND engineering 21 57 "social justice" AND "developing countries" 22 25 "social justice" AND "developing world" 23 7

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"social justice" AND underserved 24 0 "social justice" AND underdeveloped 25 0 "participatory technology" 26 16 "participatory design" AND "developing countries" 27 12 "participatory design" AND "developing world" 28 2 "participatory design" AND underdeveloped 29 0 "participatory design" AND underserved 30 0 "participatory design" AND vulnerable 31 5 "engineers without borders" 32 53 "bridges to prosperity" 33 0 "engineering world health" 34 4 "rural appraisal" 35 25 "human centered design" AND "developing countries" 36 4 "human centered design" AND "developing world" 37 2 "human centered design" AND underdeveloped 38 0 "human centered design" AND underserved 39 0 "design toolkit" 40 0 "appropriate technology" AND "developing countries" 41 71 "appropriate technology" AND "developing world" 42 15 "appropriate technology" AND underdeveloped 43 6 "appropriate technology" AND underserved 44 3 "appropriate technology" AND design 45 216 "Engineers against poverty" 46 7 "Practical Action" AND engineering 47 33 Sub-total 1448

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Table A2. Number of Paper Discarded and Kept at Each Selection Step Step 1 - Title and source

screening Step 2 - Abstract

Screening Step 3 - Full Text

Appraisal Search ID

Found Duplicates (n)

Discarded (n)

Kept (n)

Discarded (n)

Kept (n)

Discarded (n)

Kept (n)

1 34 8 8 18 12 6 4 2 2 27 2 19 6 5 1 0 1 3 15 0 11 4 3 1 1 0 4 205 33 160 12 9 3 3 0 5 71 8 59 4 2 2 1 1 6 13 5 5 3 3 0 0 0 7 10 4 5 1 1 0 0 0 8 30 7 17 6 3 3 1 2 9 67 14 45 8 4 4 3 1

10 158 30 111 17 11 6 1 5 11 13 9 3 1 1 0 0 0 12 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 13 5 2 3 0 0 0 0 0 14 5 2 3 0 0 0 0 0 15 87 9 67 11 7 4 2 2 16 49 13 24 12 10 2 1 1 17 9 8 1 0 0 0 0 0 18 2 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 20 82 6 67 9 6 3 2 1 21 57 8 46 3 2 1 0 1 22 25 3 18 4 4 0 0 0 23 7 5 0 2 2 0 0 0 24 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 26 16 2 9 5 3 2 2 0 27 12 10 1 1 1 0 0 0 28 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 29 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 30 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 31 5 2 2 1 1 0 0 0 32 53 12 13 28 21 7 4 3 33 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 34 4 1 1 2 2 0 0 0 35 25 3 22 0 0 0 0 0

236

36 4 1 0 3 1 2 1 1 37 2 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 38 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 39 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 40 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 41 71 12 43 16 12 4 2 2 42 15 10 4 1 1 0 0 0 43 6 2 3 1 0 1 0 1 44 3 2 0 1 1 0 0 0 45 216 70 134 12 10 2 1 1 46 7 1 6 0 0 0 0 0 47 33 6 19 8 7 1 0 1

Subtotal 1448 314 934 200 145 55 29 26 IJSLE 26 4 22 Final Total 81 33 48

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Appendix B: List of Collected Methods Table B.1. List of methods along with their sources and other characteristics based on the classification system of chapter 5. method Direct source(s) Design Phase Generic goal Specific goal participation level A.R.T (Action-Research-Training)

Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning To plan a project A.R.T. helps you assess the balance and integration of three project components: (i) actions, aimed at achieving project or program goals, (ii) research, consisting of data collection and analysis, and (iii) training, involving capacity-building events and strategies.

Passive

Arena model Bowen and Acciaioli (2015) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

To model the relationships among all the stakeholders Passive

Back-it-out IDEO (2014) Problem Framing and Planning to formulate goals/objectives To rearticulate the problems or needs into opportunity areas. Passive

BEGINNERS MIND IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

To foster self-awareness 1. to identify and set aside desingers' personal biases passive

238

BRAINSTORM IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution to brainstorm solutions Passive

Build on the Idea IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution To gather feedback on prototyped solutions Consultative

Calendars Almedom et al. (1997); Freudenberger (2008); PeaceCorps (2005)

Context-Related Information Gathering

To understand socio-cultural, political, and economical aspects of a community

To obtain detailed information on the activities of local men, women, and children at different times of the year. Co-constructive

CAPABILITIES QUICK SHEET IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution 1. to understand what capabilities a proposed solutions requires passive

Causal Dynamics Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to understand a problem Causal Dynamics helps you assess the causes of a key problem and the way each cause interacts with other causes.

Co-constructive

Comparing and sorting objects Beebe (2001) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals Consultative

COMPETING GOALS Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to rank goals/objectives 1. rank stakeholder's goals co-constructive

Create Framework IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data analysis To understand issues and relationships in a clear, holistic way Passive

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DAILY ACTIVITIES PeaceCorps (2005) Context-Related Information Gathering

To understand socio-cultural, political, and economical aspects of a community

1. to identify the routine labor demands of community members co-constructive

Diagrams IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data analysis To map out how ideas related to a solution relate to each other and 2. how processes and experiences change over time.

Passive

EXPERT INTERVIEWS IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution 2. to gain technological adivices passive

FIND THEMES IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data analysis 1. to share what designers learned and find important themes passive

Focus groups Beebe (2001); IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from a group of individuals Consultative

FORCE FIELD Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to understand a problem 1. understand people's view about the factors that cause a problem and those that counter attack it or stop it

co-constructive

FRAME THE DESIGN CHALLENGE IDEO (2014) Problem Framing and Planning

to understand a problem 1. to frame the design challenge passive

240

Gaps and Conflicts Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to understand a problem Th is technique helps you fi nd out if your key problem is mostly about gaps or confl icts in power, interests (gains and losses), moral values, or information and communication.

Consultative

Gender roles/tasks analysis Almedom et al. (1997) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

To find out which activities or tasks are acceptable for men, which are assigned to women, and which are acceptable for both men and women in the local culture, and why.

Consultative

Historyline Almedom et al. (1997); Freudenberger (2008)

Context-Related Information Gathering

To understand socio-cultural, political, and economical aspects of a community

To investigate local history in general terms Co-constructive

HUMAN CAPABILITIES MATRIX Leydens and Lucena (2014) Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

1. to evaluate different proposed solution based on their potential to enhance human capabilities passive

IDEAL SCENARIO Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to formulate goals/objectives 1. to develop visions of objectives co-constructive

INSPIRATION IN NEW PLACES IDEO (2014) Problem Framing and Planning to understand a problem 1. to get a fresh perspective on the problem passive

241

Message board Magoon et al. (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals or groups Consultative

MODELS IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution 1. to create a physical and cheap model of a possilbe solution passive

Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) Garfi and Ferrer-Mati (2011) Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

performance criteria and evaluation indicators that can be applied in MCA for water and basic sanitation roject assessment in small rural communities of developing countries, including technical, social, economic and environmental aspects

Passive

Obervations Beebe (2001); Almedom et al. (1997); IDEO (2014)

Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals or groups Consultative

OBERVE VS INTERPRET IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

To foster self-awareness 1. to identify and set aside desingers' personal biases passive

242

OPTION DOMAIN Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to formulate goals/objectives 1. develop options of actions co-constructive

Order and Chaos Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning To plan a project to identify the planning approach you need by answering two questions. Th e questions are: how do you assess your chances of achieving your project or program goals, and how confi dent are you in the knowledge that you have about the conditions or factors aff ecting your plan?

Passive

Participatory Co-Design IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution 1. to co-create a prototype co-constructive

Participatory Mapping Beebe (2001); Almedom et al. (1997), Freudenberger (2008); PeaceCorps (2005)

Context-Related Information Gathering

To map the community To identify physical aspects of a community Co-constructive

PHOTOVOICE Aslam et al. (2013); Wang and Burris (1997)

Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection 1. to enable people to record and reflect their community's trengths and concerns co-constructive

243

PLANNING TOOLS 2 - Solutions Freudenberger (2008) Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

2. to select what solutions the communities wants to use co-constructive

PRIORITY RANKING PeaceCorps (2005) Problem Framing and Planning to rank goals/objectives 1. rank stakeholder's goals co-constructive

PRIVILEGE BY NUMBERS Leydens and Lucena (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

To foster self-awareness 1. fosters awareness of how invisible privileges are until they are discussed explicitly passive

PRIVILEGE WALK Leydens and Lucena (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

To foster self-awareness 1. to raise awareness about one personal social status passive

Problem Ranking Matrix Freudenberger (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to rank goals/objectives 1. to priortize what problems the community wishes to address co-constructive

PROBLEM TREE Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to understand a problem 1. analyze first and second-level causes and effects of a problem co-constructive

Questionnaires Beebe (2001) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals or groups Consultative

244

Role Dynamics Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

assess what stakeholders expect of each other or themselves, as a result of a contract, a promise or a moral responsibility, and how satisfi ed they are with how stakeholders perform their roles.

Co-constructive

ROLE-PLAY IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution 1. to gain perspective and understanding of the emotional experience using a proposed solution

passive

SECONDARY RESEARCH Beebe (2001); Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals or groups passive

SELF-DOCUMENTATION IDEO (2014) Context-Related Information Gathering

To understand socio-cultural, political, and economical aspects of a community

1. to understand the nuances of community life consultative

245

Semi-structured interview Beebe (2001); Almedom et al. (1997); IDEO (2014); Freudenberger (2008)

Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals Consultative

Social Analysis Clip Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

create profi les of the parties involved in a core problem or action. Th ese profi les are based on four factors: (i) power, (ii) interests, (iii) legitimacy, and (iv) existing relations of collaboration and confl ict.

Consultative

SOCIAL DOMAIN Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

1. to understand relations and charateristics of stakeholders co-constructive

STAKEHOLDER IDENTIFICATION Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

1. to identify stakeholders that are effected and have infulence on the project Consultative

STORY BOARDS IDEO (2014) Solution Development To Ideate and Prototype a solution 1. to gain perspective and understanding of the story of user's experience using a proposed solution

passive

246

Structured Decision Making Avrai and Post (2012) Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

involving affected stakeholders in decisions about POU water treatment systems Consultative

Sustainability Matrix McConville and Mihelcic (2007) Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

Passive

SWOT - AHP Okello et al. (2014) Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

to apprais alternatives using Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)-Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Consultative

Teather Ones (2013) Context-Related Information Gathering

Multipurpose - data collection Gather a variety of information from individuals or groups Co-constructive

THE COMMUNITY ACTION PLAN Freudenberger (2008) Problem Framing and Planning

To plan a project 1. to create an action plan co-constructive

TIMELINE Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Problem Framing and Planning to understand a problem 1. to understand how a problem orgininated and evolved over time co-constructive

ToolsMatrix Freudenberger (2008) Problem Framing and Planning To plan a project to plan how to gather needed information passive

247

TRANSECT WALKS or Systematic Walkabout

Almedom et al. (1997); Freudenberger (2008)

Context-Related Information Gathering

To map the community 1. To map thep physical aspects of a community consultative

V.I.P. (Values, Interests, Positions Chevalier and Buckles (2008) Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

compare the positions that stakeholders take on a problem or action with their actual interests and the moral values they hold.

Consultative

VALUE SENSITIVE TECHNICAL INVESTICATION Frideman et al 2006 Solution Development to evaluate possible solutions or courses of action

1. to compare possible technological solutions based on stakeholders' values passive

VALUE SENSTIVE CONCEPTUAL AND EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATONS

Frideman et al 2006 Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

1. to understand what values are important for direct and indirect stakeholders consultative

VENN DIAGRAM or SOCIAL NETWORK MAPPING

Freudenberger (2008); PeaceCorps (2005)

Context-Related Information Gathering

to identify and characterize project participants and stakeholders

1. to understand the internal organization of a community and its relationship to the external enviroment co-constructive

WEALTH RANKING Freudenberger (2008) Context-Related Information Gathering

To understand socio-cultural, political, and economical aspects of a community

1. to understand wealth and resources distribution within communities co-constructive

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Appendix C: Possible Participation Framework for Classification of Methods Based on the participation ladders that I reviewed in Chapter 2, I constructed a new participation ladder (see table B.1). In this framework, I evaluate participation based on the five dimensions: 1) who gets to decide?, 2) how does information flow?, 3) what weight is given to the information?, 4) what methods are used?, and 4) what roles each counterpart plays?. The framework is organized in hierarchical rungs to indicate an increase in locals’ participation. However, it should not be seen as a ladder that goes from worst to best, rather, humanitarian engineering should choose the most appropriate rung based on the situation in which they are (understanding this is the second goal of this dissertation, see RQ2). In this framework, I use the term ‘outsiders’ to describe the humanitarian engineers and any other organization (e.g., NGOs) with whom humanitarian engineers are partnering. Instead, I use ‘locals’ to describe the local communities members whom the engineers are trying to serve. In this section, I provide a brief but thorough description of each rung and then I describe how it could be used to make conclusions about communities’ participation in HE projects. Rung 1: No participation This is the case when locals are not involved in decision-making at any degree:

 Who makes the decisions? Only the outsiders decide.  How information flow? Information does not flow between outsiders and locals.  How much weight information has on decisions? Because no information flows,

locals’ opinions, knowledge, values or others cannot influence decision-making.  How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? No method is used.

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 What roles are played in decision-making? The outsiders can be seen as dictators, while the locals do not play any role.

Rung 2: Decorative The relationship between outsiders and locals is the same described at the previous rung. However, at this rung outsider pretend that the locals are making meaningful contributions.

 Who makes the decisions? Only the outsiders decide.  How information flow? It appears that information is flowing and that locals are

involved, but in reality, it is not the case.  How much weight information has on decisions? Because no information flows,

locals’ opinions, knowledge, values or others cannot influence decision-making.  How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? No method is used.  What roles are played in decision-making? The HE project can be seen as a house,

the outsiders as the landlords who want to sell or rent the house, while the locals as candleholders or other decorative objects that are used to make the house look better than it really is.

Rung 3: Passive This is the first rung in which locals are truly involved. However, they are simply assigned and informed (Hart, 1992).

 Who makes the decisions? Only the outsiders decide.  How information flow? Information flows from outsiders who communicate what

decisions they made to the locals.

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 How much weight information has on decisions? As for the rungs above, because no information flows to the outsiders, locals’ opinions, knowledge, values or others cannot influence decision-making.

 How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? The information could be delivered with presentations, public notices, press release, exhibitions, or other one-way methods.

 What roles are played in decision-making? The outsiders could be seen as actors and actresses who are performing in front of an audience (the locals). The audience could like or dislike what done by the actor and actresses, but cannot do much about it.

Rung 4: Functional In this rung, locals are allowed to express opinions but are still the outsiders that keep control on when to involve locals and what weight to give to locals’ opinions.

 Who makes the decisions? Only the outsiders decide.  How information flow? The information flows from the locals to the outsiders.

Although there might be some informal exchange, the relationship is not dialectic.  How much weight information has on decisions? It is up to the outsiders to decide

whether or not to use gathered information.  How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? Methods to gather

information include surveys, comment cards, feedback channels, one-on-one interviews, focus groups and others.

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 What roles are played in decision-making? In this case, the outsiders are acting as planners who are trying to collect information to improve the effectiveness of the project, while the locals can be seen as data-points. It is up to the planners to decide if the data-points are valuable or are outliers to be discarded.

Rung 5: Empathic. In this rung, outsiders are committed to include locals’ realities in the decision- making process and in doing so they open space for locals to make some decisions, although outsiders keep most of decision-making power.

 Who makes the decisions? Outsiders and locals make decisions together, however decision-making power is mostly on outsiders’ hands.

 How information flow? Information flows is two-ways, with an emphasis on outsiders gathering information from the locals.

 How much weight information has on decisions? Information is gathered and delivered with a commitment of the outsiders to involve locals’ opinions, values, and knowledge in decision-making.

 How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? Methods may include workshops, bilateral sessions, focus groups, users or stakeholder panels, and interaction in informal setting and social situations.

 What roles are played in decision-making? As for the previous rung, outsiders act as researchers. However, locals are seen as subject-matter-experts (SME) whose knowledge, opinions, and values cannot be dismissed.

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Rung 6: Collaborative. To move from empathic to collaborative, outsiders must allow communities to take part in decision-making as equals.

 Who makes the decisions? Outsiders and locals have equal decision-making power.

 How information flow? Information is constantly shared among outsiders and locals.

 How much weight information has on decisions? Information is shared with a commitment of both the outsiders and locals to value each other realities.

 How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? Outsiders introduce participatory methods, such for instance PRA. Thus, there will be a phase were outsiders are leading while locals are learning.

 What roles are played in decision-making? In this rung, both the outsiders and locals can be seen as partners.

Rung 7: Collegial. This the first rung were the locals hold most of decision-making, although the outsiders have still some degree of control.

 Who makes the decisions? Locals make the decisions with the support and guidance of the outsiders.

 How information flow? Information flows is two-ways, with an emphasis on locals gathering information from outsiders.

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 How much weight information has on decisions? Information gathered from outsiders is highly valued.

 How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? Methods are the same used in collaborative and empathic relationships.

 What roles are played in decision-making? Locals can be seen as agents who take control and change their world. While outsiders can be seen as facilitators or catalysts who support and enable locals to take control. Rung 8: Self-mobilized

This is the last rung where locals act independently than outsiders.  Who makes the decisions? Only the locals decide.  How information flow? Locals gather information from outsiders.  How much weight information has on decisions? Locals may or may not use the

information they gather from the outsiders.  How information is gathered, delivered, or shared? Methods could be the same

used in the functional and passive rungs.  What roles are played in decision-making? Locals can be seen as drivers who, if

they feel lost, may consult their GPS (the outsiders) to ask for information. However, it is up to them to decide whether or not to trust and use the information coming from the GPS.

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Table B.1: Levels of Communities’ Participation in Humanitarian Engineering Projects This framework aims at evaluating the extent to which communities participate in Humanitarian Engineering projects.

Levels of Participation No participation Decorative Passive Functional Empathic Collaborative Collegial Self-mobilized Dimensions Description Who makes decisions? Capital letters indicate greater decision-making power.

OUTSIDERS OUTSIDERS + locals OUTSIDERS + LOCALS

Outsiders + LOCALS LOCALS

How information flows? Describes the direction of the information flow that may influence decision-making. Thickness of the arrow indicates flow rate.

No flow Info appears to be gathered or delivered, but it is not in reality.

OL to OL OL to OL O

L OL OL OL to OL

How much weight information has on decisions?

Descries the extent to which decision makers let information influence their decisions.

No information to decision makers, so information cannot influence decision making. May or may not influence Influence

May or may not influence

How is info gathered, delivered, or shared?

Lists of typical methods used to deliver, gather, or share information. No method is used Presentations, public notice, press release, exhibitions

Surveys, comment cards, feedback channels, interviews, focus groups

Stakeholder panels, focus groups, interviews, interactions in informal settings and social situations

Participatory learning and action research methods.

What roles are played in decision-making?

Metaphors for roles of outsiders Dictators landlords Actors Actresses Planners Researchers Partners Catalysts GPS

Metaphors for roles of locals Candleholders Audience Data points Experts Agents Drivers

VITA

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VITA

Andrea Mazzurco

Current Position Purdue University May 2015 – Jul 2016 Graduate Research Assistant

Education Purdue University Aug 2016 Doctor of Philosophy, Engineering Education Dissertation: “Methods to Facilitate Community Participation in Humanitarian Engineering Projects: Laying the Foundation for a Learning Platform.”

Purdue University Dec 2011 Master of Science, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering

Politecnico di Milano Jan 2011 Bachelor of Science, Aerospace Engineering Milan, Italy

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Past Positions Purdue University Jan 2015 – Sep 2016 Co-coordinator, Global Engineering Education Collaboratory (GEEC)

Purdue University Future Faculty Fellow, First Year Engineering May 2014 – May 2015

Peer Reviewed Journal Papers Mazzurco, A., & Jesiek, B. (under review). A synthesis of community participation frameworks to inform humanitarian engineering best practices. IEEE Technology and Society.

Philips, C. M. L., Joslyn, C. H., & Mazzurco, A. (under review). Social justice in the engineering curriculum: Course modules to challenge the dominant engineering culture. International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace.

Mazzurco, A., Huff, J. L., & Jesiek, B. K. (2014). The Energy Conversion Playground (ECP) design task: Assessing how students think about technical and non-technical considerations in sustainable community development. International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, 9(2), 64-84.

Jesiek, B., Zhu, Q., Woo, S., Thompson, J., & Mazzurco, A. (2014). Global engineering competency in context: Situations and behaviors. Online Journal for Global Engineering Education.

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Peer Reviewed Conference Papers Jesiek, B. K., Trellinger, N. M., Mazzurco, A. (2016). Becoming boundary spanning engineers: Research methods and preliminary findings. 2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition.

Jesiek, B. K., Mazzurco, A., & Trellinger, N. M. (2015). Becoming boundary spanners in engineering: Identifying roles, activities, and competencies. Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Annual Conference.

Mazzurco A., Zhu, Q., Wuji G., & Zhao, F. (2014). A comparative study of clay brick and fly ash brick in USA and China: Environmental and sociocultural perspectives. Proceedings of 2014 International Symposium on Sustainable Systems & Technologies.

Mazzurco A., & Jesiek, B. K. (2014). Learning from failure: developing a typology to enhance global service-learning engineering projects. Proceedings of 2014 ASEE Conference and Exhibition.

Mazzurco A., Huff J. L., & Jesiek, B. K. (2013). Raising student’s cultural awareness through design scenario. Proceedings of 2013 ASEE Conference and Exhibition.

Mazzurco A., Jesiek B., & Ramane K. (2012). Are Engineering Students Culturally Intelligent? Preliminary Results of a Multi-Institutional Survey. Proceedings of 2013 ASEE Conference and Exhibition.

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Presentations, Workshops, Invited Talks, and Posters Philips, C. M. L., Joslyn, C. H., & Mazzurco, A. (2015). Social justice in the engineering curriculum: Course modules to challenge the dominant engineering culture. 2015 Engineering Social Justice and Peace Conference.

Mazzurco, A. (2015). Methods to meaningfully engage community members in humanitarian engineering projects. 2015 Engineering Social Justice and Peace Conference.

Mazzurco, A., & Jesiek, B. K. (2015). Classification of problem framing and solving methods for humanitarian engineering. Poster at the 2015 Humanitarian Technology Conference, Boston, May 12-14.

Jesiek, B. K., Mazzurco, A., Lucena, J. C., Lehr, J., Thompson, J. (2014). Frontiers of humanitarian engineering: Learning from social justice, feminism, and failures. Workshop at the 2014 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, San José, CA.

Mazzurco A. (2013). Engenharia dos oprimidos: A model of participatory engineering project for sustainable community development. 2013 Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace Conference

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