Personally Meaningful Design: Sound Making to Foster Engineering Practices with Artifacts from Home

Santiago Hurtado (), Teemu Leinonen and Anna Keune ()
Additional contact information
Santiago Hurtado: Institute of Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences and Technology, Department of Educational Sciences, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany
Teemu Leinonen: Department of Art and Media, Aalto University, 02150 Espoo, Finland
Anna Keune: Institute of Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences and Technology, Department of Educational Sciences, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 20, 1-18

Abstract: Early engineering experiences can provide young people with experiences that can contribute to developing longer-term interest in the field and addressing dropout issues faced in engineering internationally. One way to engage young people with engineering is through the creation of personally meaningful sound-making projects with everyday materials and electronic kits. Sound making can make it possible for people to connect to their personal experiences and to represent these personal experiences through artistic means while also performing engineering practices, like asking questions, defining and delimiting problems, and developing and optimizing solutions with physical materials that produce sounds. Such design processes are referred to as engaging in the design of personally meaningful projects. However, it remains underspecified what personally meaningful means and, therefore, what aspects to integrate into engineering educational activity and technology designs to foster personally meaningful design opportunities. Building on constructionist perspectives on learning, this qualitative research investigated engineering practices as middle-school-aged youth used electronic construction kits and personal tangible material objects to create sounds. Iterative and thematic analysis of engineering practices of semi-structured interviews and video-recorded youth workshops showed that sound making with personal objects and electronic construction kits is a context for engineering design practices. This study also showed that integrating personal tangible projects that materialize personal histories can foster engineering practices. The findings contribute to our understanding of the theoretical idea of personally meaningful design in constructionism by presenting the importance of integrating personal histories through the design of personal projects with tangible material objects of a person’s life.

Keywords: engineering learning; constructionism; sound; construction kits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/20/14962/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/20/14962/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:20:p:14962-:d:1261392

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().