University engineering programs across the USA engage in service learning projects. These projects involve student teams designing and implementing products or solutions for communities in need, often in developing nations. There has been much research done relating to pedagogy and the impact of these programs on student learning. However, less research has been done on measuring the impact of these programs on the affected communities. This paper examines factors that practitioners believe are related to successfully delivering a desirable and transferable solution to affected communities. The authors identified 46 distinct factors from the literature that implicitly or explicitly are suggested to contribute to successful project outcomes. Formed as postulates in this paper, these 46 factors have been separated into 5 categories to assist understanding and implementing these factors into service learning programs. Lastly, different methods of analyzing and measuring project success and impact are discussed. Future methods for proving the viability of the 46 postulates are discussed as well.

The senior-level mechanical engineering design class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is 2.009: Product Engineering Processes. Students work in large teams over a semester to develop mechanical and electro-mechanical alpha prototypes for a wide variety of novel consumer products. Class features include a comprehensive, interactive web site; a theme-based approach to project scoping; and the early stages of product development from opportunity identification to product definition to designing and building an alpha prototype. To further enhance the applied learning focus of the class, a service learning teaching approach has been adopted and studied for the past four years. While the approach initially posed some challenges, most students responded positively and, after some course infrastructure adjustments, there have been strong positive outcomes in 2004 and 2005, particularly in student attitudes. Assessment over the four years shows certain trends including particular benefits for female students. Additionally, in 2004, students’ interest in engineering-oriented careers increased significantly over the course of the semester. This impact appears to have carried over into students’ job choices upon graduation, and may have positively shaped the goals and expectations of students entering the class in the subsequent year.

The need exists to develop foundational knowledge, methods, and tools to equip engineers in discovering, documenting, and acting upon contextual information important for successful product design. In response to this need, this paper addresses a gap in current design methodologies which inadequately support accounting for contextual information. Adequately accounting for contextual information is especially challenging when the design context is frontier (unfamiliar) to the designers, as is often the case with high human-need projects. Based on a classification framework, literature search, and empirical study, a contextual needs assessment methodology is presented to assist the designer in discovering and documenting the “how,” “where,” and “who” factors of the product context. Experimental assessments and an application of the approach to an inventive product design provide both quantitative and qualitative measures of the usability, usefulness, and designer acceptance of the proposed contextual needs assessment method. Additionally, anonymous surveys report equal or greater perceived value of the new method for student design projects when compared with the benchmark of well-established methodologies such as black box and activity diagrams. These exciting results provide strong justification for the widespread dissemination of the methodology in education as well as in field practice.