Credit: Navajo Water Project
By Vivian La
On Tuesday afternoons, a group of engineering students gather for a weekly lab meeting at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. A man held the door open for me the day I made a visit to one of these meetings. After I thanked him, he asked if I was a med student. “No,” I said with a laugh, “I’m actually a journalist going to an engineering lab meeting.” Surprised, he said he was also on his way there. He was an electrical and computer engineering student, Listowell Appiah. It seemed like we were both rarely on this part of campus.
More people filed in. One woman asked another student if she was a part of the lab and she responded with, “I’m not a part of this research group, I just come to learn.” There were two students present who weren’t actively doing research with the lab’s lead, which is uncommon for a lab group.
But even more uncommon is the lab’s focus. This was a meeting about contextual engineering, a concept that you likely won’t find at any other institution because it started at the University of Illinois.
The idea is that engineers too often go into communities with a predetermined idea of what the problem is and how to fix it, rather than considering the contextual issues at play. The result is an engineering “solution” that ends up being rejected by the people it was supposed to help.
Context can mean a lot of things. It can be social — what are some of the existing inequities or unique historical factors that might make a community wary of a group of researchers? And it can also be environmental. The people living in a place are often the experts on the land, the water, the animals. Contextual engineering tries to center the knowledge that is already present in a place.
In the lab meeting, graduate student Jason Kandume was presenting his idea for a potential research project in his home country of Namibia. He observed his mom extracting oil from Kalahari melon seeds, a staple crop in the region, through a laborious process that takes hours. Kandume wanted to help his mom and the other women in the community with this process.
But an important part of Kandume’s thinking was that he didn’t want to compromise the flavor if he were to mechanize this process. Or take away from the social aspect of the extraction process, since women often gathered to do this extraction together.
Ann-Perry Witmer.
After his presentation, Kandume looked over to Ann-Perry Witmer, engineering professor and the lab’s principal investigator for guidance. “Hopefully this generates a lot of questions,” Witmer said to her students. She coined the term contextual engineering, and many of the students in the room — most from outside the U.S. — came to the University of Illinois to study under her.
Students peppered Kandume with questions like how much money women could get from selling this oil to the government or how the melon was used. Through all of this, Witmer sat at the front of the table with a slight smile as she listened to all the different directions the conversation was going. Later, she would tell me that her role in these meetings is to act like guardrails, steering her students only if they veered off-track. Witmer only chimed in at the end when students began thinking about the goal of improving this process — specifically how scaling this process could improve the community’s economy.
“We’re contextual engineers, not contextual development assistance,” she reminded them. It’s not an engineer’s job to market, but to innovate. It becomes contextual when you ask people what they want and use that to guide the design process, she said. Students decided at the end of the meeting that the best course of action is to innovate, return the knowledge to the community, and let them decide how they want to use it, or if they want to use it at all. One student’s moment of realization was visible when his eyes lit up and he sat back in his chair with a long “Oh.”
Witmer said these moments make her excited because that’s just one more student who is thinking more contextually about this work. What initially draws a lot of people to the technical field is that it’s purely objective, so recognizing engineering as something deeply tied to social or subjective factors takes time. Witmer herself was guilty of this. After a career in journalism and frustration about confronting gray areas, she decided to make a switch into engineering thinking it would be more straightforward. She was wrong.
“The Kool-Aid that you drink in engineering starts when you’re a child, because everything is fact-based,” Witmer said. At the beginning of the semester, she always asks her students, when do you stop making decisions and follow the engineering? They’ll say it’s when the problem is defined. But Witmer argues this approach is flawed.
“Do you know how many decisions you make every day based on your own knowledge and your own expertise? And everybody is convinced that there is no personal identity involved in engineering?” she said.
The reason her lab meets in the College of Medicine is because of Witmer’s position as a lecturer, which began in 2024. It’s also a chance to connect her engineering work of solving physical needs to medicine’s work of solving internal needs. Witmer said medical students are good at cramming information for exams but also intimately aware of their relationship with patients. It very much parallels the goals of contextual engineering.
“Every time we go to a doctor, you’re aware that doctors are either good at listening and working with you, or completely dismiss you and tell you what’s wrong with you,” she said. “And so I think there’s a kind of a consilience there that will help me in thinking about how to convince engineers.”
Contextual engineering both requires an understanding of historical influences like colonialism and inequity, and centers the knowledge that already exists in a place. These ideas are closely aligned with Indigenous knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge — and most often dismissed by Western science.
Dean Dempsey
One such example comes from the Navajo Nation. Dean Dempsey, a field engineer who is Diné, recalled how his grandmother could often look at a type of grass and predict with startling accuracy how much snow there would be in the winter. It’s called tł’ohnást’ąsi in Navajo, or blue grama grass. There’s a curl attached to the tip of the grass that grows a certain height in the summer, which is a good predictor for snowfall amounts.
When Witmer first learned about this while on the reservation with Dempsey, she started brainstorming all the ways this phenomenon could be explained by science. “There could be confirmation bias on the years that she gets it right,” she said. “Or there could be something about that plant physically that responds to barometric conditions, atmospheric moisture, whatever, that actually makes it a reliable predictor. But we don’t know.”
What she does know is that people are quick to judge any knowledge that isn’t validated by institutions or Western concepts. She told researchers in agricultural and bioengineering about this fascinating finding and some dismissed it as witchcraft.
Place-based knowledge doesn’t usually align with us, and so we throw it out. “But there’s a lot of knowledge that’s out there that is derived from place. That knowledge is there because these people have been there. They understand the relationship of their surroundings with themselves,” Witmer said.
Dempsey said it’s really just about observing your environment. And for engineers, that means learning to observe people as well. “We have all kinds of emotions and all kinds of feelings.”
Dempsey got to know Witmer and some of her students when he lived in Danville, Ill. and has since moved back to the Navajo nation to work on water infrastructure issues. He works on DigDeep’s Navajo Water Project, an Indigenous-led organization that centers place-based knowledge. The project aims to help the estimated 30% of families there without access to pipe water, according to data from the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources.
Dempsey sees firsthand how the ability to shape the environment, as engineers do, can have a profound positive effect. “One of the most awesome things is watching a child get excited to see rainwater, to see water come out of the sink and they touch it — it’s mind-blowing to them and for us.”
As for the concepts of contextual engineering, Dempsey sees how his daily practices of listening and learning overlap with what Witmer teaches her students. It’s a more formal translation of what he tries to do every day on the reservation.
“I think one of the best ways to become an engineer is to listen and to work off your resources, getting to know your resources, you know, because you don’t know everything,” he said. “Even on the Navajo reservation. The people, we’re all Navajo but everyone’s different. Every community is different.”
The Navajo Water Project helps install home water systems for Navajo people who don’t have them. Credit: Navajo Water Project
Contextual engineering is growing at the University of Illinois, evidenced by Witmer having to turn down numerous graduate applications. But at such a prestigious engineering school, there’s bound to be some skepticism. The clout of the school is also why Witmer feels this is the right place to shore up contextual engineering than at a smaller institution. “I could probably make inroads a whole lot faster, but I wouldn’t have the impact. So in a way, I would rather be here knowing that I’m reaching top-tier engineers, even in small numbers. To just set that group growth of critical mass up.”
Most engineering instructors understand where Witmer is coming from, but not as its own area of study. “I think there’s a fear that this waters down the technical focus, rather than a recognition that it hones that technical focus,” she said.
This was the case for Melody Rasoulian, a first-year Ph.D. student in electrical engineering. Rasoulian spent her entire engineering education in Iran focusing on control and power systems, the epitome of technical focus. But she noticed there was a gap in what she was supposedly optimizing for clients and what clients actually wanted.
“I feel like my mind is trained to just focus on the technical part and just come up with different equations and just get the answer out of those equations. I am not used to just zooming out and analyzing a problem from another perspective,” Rasoulian said. This is where a lab meeting on Kalahari melons in Namibia, something she has never experienced before in engineering school, is hugely eye-opening.
In the same way that Rasoulian was drawn to power systems because of how she can see tangible, physical elements like transformers and cables, she’s now drawn to seeing real change in communities through her work. “That is the marker because they have to see the difference. To see the change, to see the progress,” she said.
Rasoulian’s first venture into contextual engineering outside of learning about it in classrooms or lab meetings will be this spring. She and Xiomi Echeverria, master’s student in agricultural and bioengineering, will visit the Navajo reservation to meet with local leaders and continue the work of other engineers addressing water access for livestock.
Echeverria, who is from Bolivia, had a similar educational experience in engineering. “You’re just going to design,” she said about how teachers or bosses would talk to her. It wasn’t until Echeverria worked with the engineering non-profit Fundación Ingenieros en Acción — Bolivia’s office of Engineers in Action — that she began to understand the importance of building relationships with the communities you’re working in.
The goal of the project was to introduce renewable solar technologies to rural communities throughout the Sica Sica municipality of Bolivia. Echeverria’s work focused on how communities received all this new information while also not pushing an agenda. They found that the interest was there but there wasn’t enough guidance on how to actually implement some of these technologies. “The community members were like, ‘I want to learn more about this technology, because we don’t know about these technologies,’” she said. “We wanted to show them other possibilities, and we don’t want to impose an idea.”
In a way, Echeverria was practicing some of these ideas of contextual engineering before pursuing her master’s at the U. of I. But she was curious to learn more about the theory behind the practices she knew were necessary when working with rural communities.
She and Rasoulian are also keenly aware of how their work requires explaining some very complicated concepts . Not only to the communities they’re working with but also each other. “I have an idea of how electricity and energy works, but if I ask (Rasoulian), ‘What is this about?’ And she can’t use the proper words to me, I’m not involved in her field, I’m not going to understand, right?” Echeverria said. “We need to learn how to express our ideas in the proper way for different clusters of people.”
To prepare for their trip to the Navajo reservation, both are doing as much research as they can. Not just about the engineering concepts but about the culture, past failures, and the language. Echeverria said she’ll be going to more of the lab meetings to learn as much as possible, learning how to not box herself into a specific idea of what an engineer should be. What she wants to accomplish echoes something Dempsey said he tries to live by.
“Nobody knows everything,” Dempsey said. “You never stop learning. You’re always learning about something and so never close your mind to education.” Especially when the stakes for the future of engineering, and a just, sustainable world, are so high.
About the Author …
Vivian La graduated in May 2024 with a B.S. in Journalism. She is a multimedia journalist interested in the intersection of environment and equity. Her work has been published in The Daily Illini, Illinois Public Media, the Chicago Tribune, and Science magazine.
This article was the grand prize winner in the 2023 Janelle Joseph Environmental Writing Contest.