Staff Spotlight: Laura Bland
Laura Bland, Case Writer and Learning Experience Designer at the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering & Design, recently met with Storyteller Malin Andersson to discuss how she found her way to C-SED and share some insight into who she is as a person and a designer!
Story by Malin Andersson
How and why did you become involved with C-SED?
I love teaching and research, and I was looking for staff roles that combined aspects of those things but were still creative and collaborative. The main thing coming out of a more traditional research background is that it’s very isolated sometimes, and it’s very abstract. So I knew I wanted to do something more applied and more collaborative.
After the first interview, I was like, “Oh, these are my people.” Everyone is passionate about the mission, and everyone feels like they can make a real difference. I’m lucky that they gave me a shot.
How did your past teaching, research, and other work experience help you prepare you for this role?
I spent the last 12 years in the classroom in interdisciplinary programs for STEM students, and so I’m always thinking about ways to get students excited about how the equations, facts, and core science classes they’re learning about actually matter in the real world – such as getting students excited by exploring how an equation about thermodynamics actually changes politics in the US and the world in the 20th century.
This role was really a miraculous fit from what I had been doing, but instead of teaching in a more abstract way, I’m helping engineering students who are going out into the world start thinking about these issues in their engineering courses, which is something that is really important to me.
In this work, you take subjects that are often considered to be specific to a single discipline and expand them into an interdisciplinary conversation. From your experience, what is the biggest challenge of broadening subjects that were previously related to a single discipline?
The big challenge is that a fact looks like a fact. I think a lot of students love science – I mean, I love science and technology – because there’s a sense of objectivity. That we can find answers to problems. I think it can be really uncomfortable to realize that those answers are not as clear-cut as they seem. They represent particular points of view, and they introduce problems of their own that you don’t see unless you step back and ask, “Does this actually make the world better”?
Do you have an example that you can share?
I think one of the best ways of getting to this is just looking at objects. Take a piece of ugly office furniture – there is a reason why that thing is designed the way it is, and the reason for that has to do with the centralization of American capitalism over the 20th century. It has to do with the rise of factories. It has to do with offshore labor. Going to China. All of these things come together to make your ugly office furniture.
Or take the number on a kidney function test that is spit out by a piece of lab equipment. You have to get a much lower number and be much more unhealthy to qualify for a transplant if you’re Black because of historical assumptions that led to the ways that these designs were made.
Do you find that people are interested in and welcome this expansion of these subjects?
Generally, yeah! Where the rubber meets the road is often in math or physics, where people think, “That’s objective.” But then you start looking at the data that you’re getting out of this machine, considering all the decisions that went into the way that data is collected, and understanding why we built this machine instead of this other machine. And that comes from geopolitics! That comes from economics! Yes, it’s physics. Yes, it’s math. But it’s also in the world.
How has your career developed over time? What did you want to be as a kid?
I wanted to be a prop designer or costume designer for movies. I wanted to be the person who walks onto the set of Lord of the Rings, or something like that, and asks, “What kind of chair do people use in this completely made-up civilization? Or “What kind of suit does John Wick wear? And why?”
I love that kind of stuff. And there’s a weird through line between that and what I do at C-SED. That’s been really fun!
What is a current or past project that has inspired you, or has expanded your understanding of design?
For a past project, which is actually a student project that I coordinated instead of a project of my own, I would have the students do a biography of an object. They would pick something in the world around them – usually a piece of technology or scientific equipment, or even iceberg lettuce or the desk chair, for example – and just talk about why the object looks the way it does and why it was designed that way. The students would ask who it is serving, and what effects it has.
For example, people might look at TikTok and think about the choices that TikTok made in the creation of their product. Why video? How do influencers use this? What is this selling? What is this doing? How did it get to be the way it is?
Over the years, there have been hundreds of these different projects that are always windows into this whole other world that you don’t think about. It’s really rewarding.
How are you finding that through-line with your work in C-SED now? How has that transition into C-SED been?
It’s been really seamless. Right now, I’m working on the history of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which is a video game controller for people with disabilities. It’s just a really simple box that you can plug other things into, but they got there from this really innovative design process where they emphasized designing with the community, and not designing for them.
A nonprofit for disabled gamers actually created the design, and they just brought it to market, but it ended up being this incredibly successful product that all came out of looking at a standard controller and asking what assumptions people made about what you need in order to use it. It all came out of that object analysis.
In your case writing and teaching, how do you balance introducing a potentially overwhelming amount of information and also encouraging students’ own agency to make change in the world?
One framework that I always use with students and have been using a lot in the background with C-SED is simply this idea of progress. I think a lot of the media, particularly in the tech industry and Silicon Valley, champion this idea that progress is going to move forward no matter what, and you have to make sure not to get left behind. But if you actually look back at technological progress, what you see is a bunch of individual people who take great personal risks to do something risky and sometimes dangerous in order to make the world better. That progress is all about agency, and whether that’s building a better microchip or something very different, it looks like individuals making a decision to change something.
When you’re writing these case studies and designing for learning experience, what do you have in mind? What are the goals that drive you through that process?
So the first thing is to help faculty achieve what they need to achieve, starting with the question, “What aren’t students doing now that you would like them to do better?”
In a more general sense, what I want out of each project is to open up that world to help students be able to see how small decisions can make a big difference, not just for an actual product, but also how something looks in the real world.
Probably the third thing has to do with this question of what can I do? There are sometimes these massive projects that often fail, and they often fail for really stupid reasons. Looking at the history of some of these massive projects can help people understand that the real world isn’t about a genius going out and creating something single-handedly. It’s about working with people to achieve something, and that requires thinking about the bigger world.
What do you wish more people understood about design, engineering education, or research in general?
I don’t want to be too prescriptive here, because this field is new to me, but I wish people understood that the process doesn’t end when you figure out what the product is going to look like. Once that goes out into the market and into the world is as important, and even more important, than what it looks like at launch. I’d like people to think more about the end stages of design and wonder who maintains it, what effect it has on the community that you’ve introduced it to, and what challenges you foresee in the future.
What have you enjoyed about your role so far with C-SED?
The people. As you were saying, everybody is committed. Everyone’s on the same page. Everyone’s incredibly collaborative and generous with their time and their expertise. They are excited to learn and excited to do something really good for the students.
What is it like to collaborate with your fellow case writers?
It’s awesome! We meet weekly. We’re actually meeting today to do a pilot of Neil’s case, so we get to do a little practice teaching and get to role-play as students. We help each other with feedback at every stage of the design process. We’re designers, too, and it’s really good to be a practitioner as well as a teacher.
Are there any areas of passion or expertise that you particularly enjoy exploring? Any era in history? Any specific event? It sounds like there’s a lot, but is there anything specific that jumps out to you?
In terms of specific eras or fields, I love food. I love the history of food. I think you can teach anything through food, and I would love to talk about that.
In terms of skills that people could come and talk with me about, I’m really passionate about storytelling and thinking of ways to make dead facts and details engaging and to bring them into that wider context. I would say that’s the process part that I’m really passionate about.
Do you have a favorite way to make those “dead facts” or details engaging?
I’d say big picture – I like big picture storytelling. If you want to take something back to Ancient Rome, or talk about how the geology influences voting patterns in a particular county, let’s do it!
Is there anything else that you would like to share? Any activities that you love?
I love gardening. We’ve got a whole super hot pepper patch. And I love art. I’m doing live art classes a few times every week, and I still try to stay involved in that.