Teaching Context-Sensitive Design to Undergraduates

Abstract

Context-sensitive design (CSD), also referred to as context-sensitive solutions, is an increasingly important topic for transportation design engineers. More and more projects need to incorporate community wishes and environmental and land use constraints, integrate historic elements, and blend aesthetically with environs. Introducing CSD explicitly in undergraduate civil engineering classes is a good way to encourage our future engineers to think about design challenges. Resources for teaching CSD are presented here, as well as descriptions of activities and assignments used in university civil engineering courses. A casual survey of students who had been exposed to CSD as undergraduates was conducted. Their responses are provided here. CSD has the benefit of attracting students to transportation design, asking engineers to consider public involvement and interdisciplinary elements in their projects, and addressing some of the new skills recommended for professional engineers. This paper describes why undergraduate engineers should be taught CSD, how CSD should be taught, and what the benefits of teaching CSD to undergraduate engineers are.